[ Ali Edwards ] : September KOTM.

Today I worked on putting together my travel album from a trip to New Zealand and Australia last August - using the September Kit of the Month. This is one of those trips where I took along a travel journal (with great intentions like past trips - see my March 2006 Studio A column about Scrapbooking on the Road) and only ended up with a big pile of photos + maps + collected stuff rather than coming home with a completed journal. The truth was I just didn't feel like working on it while I was traveling.

Here's where the September kit comes in handy: it can be used after your trip OR during your trip. If you have an adventure coming up you could take it on the road and it has everything you need (including cool stamps) all ready to go in a tin that doesn't take up too much space. Or, if you want to just wait and create when you come home you can collect stuff on the road (including journaling which is always so much fresher when you are writing on the road) and just put it together another time.

This would make a good gift for someone you know who has an adventure coming up as well.

The album comes with all the pages inside the spiral but I went ahead and removed them so I could add in brochures, photos, etc and make changes to the order (for a how-to on taking minibooks apart and putting them back together click here). I am really into page size variety right now. I also added a transparency sheet on the cover and as one interior page (an 8.5x11 cut to size). For adding pages I created holes using the Bind-it-all and my Crop-a-dile.

One thing I was so happy I had were blog posts related to my trip (in addition to some handwritten things I had written in my travel journal). I printed those out onto the paper from the album and added them back in - definitely tells a more complete story than I can remember off-the-top-of-my-head a year later.

Here's a look at what I made with the kit (the rub ons were my favorite):