Easy Memory Keeping

I've only been a memory keeper for a few short years - the huge blank pages of traditional scrapbooking always intimidated me, but when Cocoa Daisy came out with their Travelers Notebook Memory Keeping kit, with its smaller SimpleDori, I gave it a try and was hooked.  I tend to be a minimalist in my decorating, and the SimpleDori pages provide a perfect backdrop for photos and a few embellishments.

I recently returned from a road trip to New York with my best friend and her family, and the SimpleDori was the perfect size to document the highlights. I used the Travelers Notebook Memory Keeping Kit and the Modern Memory Keeping Kit for everything in this project. Here are a few highlights.

One of the first places we visited in New York City was the 9-11 Memorial and Museum.  For this layout, I definitely wanted clean lines and minimal decorating.  A label and a pocket card worked well on the left side, and a few of the minimalist rub-ons worked well on the right side.  I think my favorite thing, though, might be that stamp:

I love the graphic nature of this stamp, and the fact that there are no words forcing you into a particular way of using it.  For this booklet, I used it several times to document the name and location of a particular point of interest, plus a few words to talk about it.  It's so neat and tidy!

Another technique I like to use in the SimpleDori is to print a large photograph and span it across both pages of a layout. Sometimes I push the edges of each piece right up to the center fold, and sometimes I leave a little gap, like on this spread:

I balanced out the large photo with a couple of smaller ones on the right page, and there's that awesome stamp again! But the detail that excites me most on this page one you may not notice right away - the acetate words on the lower left of the large Statue of Liberty picture.  The kit came with two pieces of several different words so you could mix and match them as you liked.  Since they're acetate, adhesive might show through the back - so I stapled them onto the photo before adhering the photo to the page. Easy as pie, and gives the impression that the words are printed onto the photograph.  Love it!

This next spread utilizes a tip-in, which is helpful when you have too many items to really fit on one spread, but you still want them all together.  A tip-in is basically a card or page that is taped down on one side so that it can open and reveal more photos or journaling.  Using the standard sized dashboard on the right side as a tip-in allowed me to highlight the image on the left, but then be able to add more photos and details underneath.

Here it is opened up:

I used rub-ons exclusively for this spread, to keep the background muted and to let the dark photos stand out.  In this detail shot, it looks like the rub-ons are partly behind the photo, but I'll let you in on my secret - I cut the rub-ons before applying them and put the straight edges right up against the edges of the photo before applying them.  This way, I was able to use the other pieces elsewhere in the booklet in the same way.

Here's another version of the large-photo-over-two-pages type of spread.  For this one, I didn't leave a gap in the middle like I did for the Statue of Liberty picture, because this photo is so striking (if I do say so myself) that I didn't want anything to take away from it.  And that's what I want to get across on this page - the photo is the star, and other than the washi tape on the side (the reverse side of the tip-in page), the print on the right side, and the puffy letters, this spread didn't need anything else to bring it to life.

How awesome is it that the washi, the puffy letters, and the photo colors all complement each other so well? This is the true beauty of the SimpleDori - you can jazz it up or leave it minimal and it's always gorgeous.

For this last spread, I turned the photos sideways so they'd all fit on the page but I wouldn't have to layer them. One larger photo, puffy letters, and my favorite stamp give the details of our waterfall hunt that day.

It occurred to me that the long, narrow stamp could look like tire treads if it was layered, and since we had been in the car driving around to find all these waterfalls, I thought that would be a fun little nod to the day:

So there you have it, some of the pages in my New York SimpleDori. To see all the pages in the book, click here: