new york, bound

last week i showed off my favorite photos from our recent new york trip; now would you like to see what i've done with them? (hint: i made a travel book! surprise, lol!)

i didn't think i was going to make a travel book this time. honestly! i mean, i do go to new york fairly often, and i keep the "treasures" i acquire in my ordinary journal AND my new york theme book; so it sort of seems like at some point these things would become a bit redundant. but being as stephanie was here, and we were actually going to spend most of the week in the city, within about 15 minutes of arriving, i had labelled this an official vacation... for which one obviously needs to make a souvenir book. (obviously!) the fact that i hadn't made journaling pages in advance suddenly became an advantage when i realized it meant that i could just collect up all the bits and bobs, then use my bind-it-all to make a "real" book out of everything when i got home. so i did. :)

it also meant i could do some fun, silly things, like make a custom "title page" out of my favorite picture, with lots of different fonts:

i emailed myself some quick notes each night, so i'd remember everything. when i got home i used my vintage typewriter (and stickers and a few photos) to record our itinerary from each day:

so what else is inside? a little bit of everything, really. menus from our favorite restaurants--with some teeny tiny pics attached because, bein' cheap, i like to fill THE WHOLE PAGE of photo paper!

there are postcards and handouts and more photos (these are from the high line):

maps (both commercial and the google kind), plus the fortune from my favorite little temple in chinatown:

tickets and leaflets and museum brochures and even more photos:

i love that the bind-it-all lets you incorporate material of all different sizes... i like that you can see little hints of what's coming up next around the smaller pieces:

i especially like having a mix of wide and narrow, long and short, single items and collages.

i made sure to attach a few fun photos "upside down" to the backs of pages, too; thus when you flip the page you can see both "planes" at the same time.

i deliberately attached some of my photos to transparency scraps so they would "float" in the book. but this see-through page is actually the trimmed down vellum bag in which my purchases from kinokuniya were packed:

yes, i saved the chopstick wrappers from the sushi place. but only because they were especially pretty chopstick wrappers, lol!

finally, another big photo for the back cover, with a little side view of all the pages in the book:

want to know my favorite thing about this project?! i get to KEEP IT! (yay!) ♥