Hey planners! Emily of Planned and Planted (Instagram & YouTube) from the Ambassador team here today. As we finish up the summer and move into fall, you’re probably reminiscing on the fun and exciting traveling you did. To ensure that these travel memories stay fresh and alive, I love making travel memories spreads in my bullet journal!

These memory spreads are such a great and easy way to remember your trips at a glance, even years into the future when certain memories aren’t as fresh. Today I’ll be walking you through the process of how I make my memory spreads, hopefully inspiring you to make some of these spreads in your journal as well.

Travel Memories Spread Video Tutorial

Since these memory spreads are pretty chaotic and aren’t an exact science, I’d recommend watching the video tutorial first so my instructions make a little more sense:

Supplies:

• Archer & Olive Notebook - I'm using a B6
• Scissors (mine are from the Dec 22 Quarterly Subscription Box)
• Adhesive Tape or Glue
• Alphabet & Letter Stamps
• Archer & Olive Calliograph Pens
• Washi Tapes
• Various Memorabilia (stickers, travel guides, receipts, photos etc.

How to Create your Travel Memories Spreads

1. Collect Memorabilia Items On Your Trip

I’ve made it a habit when I travel anywhere to try to collect little memorabilia items. These can vary, but I usually keep my eye out for: stickers, receipts, pamphlets and travel guides at gas stations, bags with logos, to-go menus from restaurants, and business cards. Many of these items are free or cheap, but these are really what I center my travel spreads around.

Make sure to take lots of photos as well! You can go back and print these out on your home printer or a print store and use them in your spreads as well.

PRO TIP: The pockets in the back of Archer and Olive notebooks are the PERFECT place to store all your memorabilia as you collect it and keep it safe throughout your travel.

2. Cut out the memorabilia and pictures 

Once the trip is finished and you have all of the items you might need, gather them all and lay them out. Now is when you cut out the specific things that you may want to use in your spread. Most of these are going to be logos or maybe the names of the city you visited if you grabbed some travel magazines or guides.

I don’t always use every single item I collected, but I like having them all cut down to size in front of me so I can better visualize and plan out how much space I will need. This is also when you will want to print and cut out your photos.

3. Organize your memorabilia and pictures into separate days

In the past I have thrown all of these elements onto a single page when I was using a B5 size bullet journal. However, since I’m using a much smaller B6 size for my travel journal this year, I decided to use several pages and break them down into certain days of the trip.

To make it easier to plan out, I separated the various memorabilia I had into separate dates. So the elements all went into separate piles based on which day we encountered them.

To help you remember what all you did on a trip, I created this free downloadable printable for you guys. You can keep this with you on your trip and at the end of the day jot down things you may want to include in the memories spread. I find that my spreads are usually centered around restaurants/bars and excursions, so I’ve left space for those in particular.

 4. Start laying out the larger pieces of memorabilia and gluing them in

I always start with the bigger elements from a particular day and move them around on the page until I find spacing that doesn’t work. Before I glue them in, I might add some background decorations like scrap paper or washi tape. Then I glue in the larger elements.

From there you can move onto the smaller elements and tape them in as well.

5. Fill in the remaining space 

Once you have the memorabilia items that you want glued in, now it’s time to fill in any blank space that’s leftover. On these spreads, I write in day of the trip it was with my Calliographs, as well as the actual date.

Then I may add some captions for some of the elements, or some general writing about that day of the trip. For this, I love using the wide brush end of the Calliographs as a highlighter to emphasize certain elements and add some more color to the spread. Any space that’s leftover after this I fill in with washi tape and with some little doodles!

6. Repeat for each day of the trip

Once you’re done with day one of the trip, do the same thing for day two! Well, not the exact same thing obviously, because that would be boring… but you know what I mean. Like I said, these spreads aren’t an exact science, and I really don’t do much laying out or planning before I start gluing and writing. There’s really no way to mess this up, so just have fun with it and trust your instincts!

My fellow Ambassador Amanda also does a lot of travel and memory-keeping in her journals. If you're not a fan of my method, she has some great tips for documenting trips as well. 

Tag us in your re-creations!

I hope you found this tutorial helpful and that it gives you some ideas of how to solidify your trip memories so that you don’t forget all of the little details in the future. If you decide to make your own spread in the future and feel like sharing, make sure to tag @archerandolive and @plannedandplanted on Instagram!

As always, thanks for reading, and happy planning.