This year for Christmas I *actually* planned ahead!! Gasp!!!

Partially because Christmas shopping and the post office in December are just terrifying, but also so that I could make some of this years gifts by hand.

The gift that I’m proudest of this year is a photo/scrapbook/memory book of my last trip to the USA with my parents in the middle of 2014. We often have a tendency to have great intentions of putting together a beautiful photo album of all of our memories…. And then never get around to it. This is the process of how I achieved this memory book.

• So thanks to the Internet I did a sneaky facebook stalk of all of the photos we had uploaded over the trip, alongside photos I had taken myself and compiled them all together.

• Then I CULLED. Partially because I was determined to fit the WHOLE NYC/Connecticut trip into this awesome kikki.k album. And secondly because I realised how expensive it was to print out a million photos.

• The next process was printing the images. I used the ‘Picture Postie’ app on my iphone. It’s incredibly handy as it linked to your phones images and you can allow it access to your social media (so you can print directly from your uploaded images and Instagram, etc…). It also does an amazing job of printing square photos at a very decent price, and then delivers the whole thing to your door!!

• As I did my own photo album at the same time as mum and dad’s (with a few pages between them being different), I had an EPIC amount of photos to sort through once they arrived. My trusty travel journal proved helpful for getting most of the images sorted into a timeline eventually!

• After all of the sorting, the really fun part was putting it all together, and reliving so many amazing memories. Attempting to fit about 150 photos into each album also proved to be a very creative task!

I’ve included only a few shots from my personal version of the album (not my parents version). And I know that myself and my parents will enjoy looking back at this photo/sticker/magic dot/white pen/memory filled book for a long, long, time.

Here’s a list of the materials I used:

• Black Photo Album (kikki.K – 23 pages)
• Magic Dots (I went through about 5 packets at least)
• Kikki.K sticker books (Inspiration, Live Bright, Under The Sea)
• White Pen (kikki.K)
• Picture Postie app – printing service
• Metallic and Pastel Pens (kikki.K)
• Scissors

Let me know how you like to keep your travel memories in the comments below.