Claire Thomson shares her own happy memories and has some tips to share in her guide to holiday scrapbooking.
We might be living in the present but we are constantly trying to remember and relive the past. From once-in-a-lifetime adventures to simple happy moments, our good memories are something that we want to keep forever and share with our loved ones.
When my brother and I were young, my mum would always take the time to document our family holidays in a photo album or scrapbook. She would print off photos, collect maps and leaflets from our trip, and write short paragraphs about our adventures. Whilst this invariably stopped as we got older, even now, there are still photos from holidays and different occasions all around the house, which are constantly being changed and updated as we continue to live our lives. There’s no doubt that these would have taken several nights to create but every now and again when they are found again after being stored away for months at a time, I’m so thankful that I have these memories printed out in front of me to look back on. I’m confident that so many people would claim that making these is a waste of time and not worth it, especially when they spend most of the year at the back of a cupboard gathering dust, but it’s the subconscious joy that they bring, which makes them so special. You have everything in front of you — the stories, the photographs, the bits and bobs that you brought back. There’s no need to go digging through thousands of photos on a phone or laptop to then try and remember the moment. The feeling you get from photo albums and scrapbooks simply cannot be explained: it’s one like no other.
During lockdown, I decided to take a leaf out of my mum’s book and create my own scrapbook from my first year at university. I was dying for a creative project, yet as I’m not much of an artist, I thought that this would be perfect. I had all this free time, so why not take it to remember better times? I think it’s fair to say that I quickly became addicted to creating my scrapbook and in the end, I must have spent almost three weeks working on it pretty much every single day. It was and still is my absolute pride and joy. Whilst I started making it as a way to kill some time, watch Netflix without feeling guilty, and do something productive, having a physical thing to look back at has been truly amazing. I have shown family and friends it and most importantly it makes me smile. All my happy memories and achievements are right there in front of me. I plan to continue creating scrapbooks for not only my years at university but also any future holidays and travels. To me, it is a fun way to relive some of my best moments.
Scrapbooking or at a minimum printing out photos for a wall display, is something I would definitely recommend. I bought a cheap colour printer and pulled out the old craft supplies from when I was a child to make mine, but there are so many different ways to create these. There are lots of different websites, which create photo books digitally and send them to your door, and it’s the same for printing out photos themselves, for example by using FreePrints and Snapfish. Having physical copies of memories can bring comfort as happiness, relieving stress and tension.
