A New Project - Canary Islands Cruise Album

I recently finished the album for our cruise round Scotland last August, and it's already time to move on to the next cruise album as we picked up a late booking deal to the Canary Islands in November. We visited five of the islands including La Palma where the volcano Cumbre Vieja was erupting.

I started choosing papers for this album by looking for a coral-based collection and hit on Heidi Swapp's Carefree, which is more peach than coral but had the right feel for me. I bought the 12x12 pad, the sticker booklet and an ephemera pack; the pad contains some cut-apart pages and all the papers are single-sided so I've already pulled out the cut-aparts and cut them up.

I can't stick to just one collection though, so I've also chosen the 12x12 pad from Jen Hadfield's Peaceful Heart collection, again removing and cutting up the cut-apart pages. Some of the more-themed papers won't work with Carefree but there are enough that will.

Finally in terms of paper I have a few sheets from Storyline, another Heidi Swapp collection with a similar feel, and 6x8 pads from OneCanoeTwo and Paige Evans, although, again, not all of the 6x8 papers will be a good match.

Moving away from paper, I have assembled a mixture of old and new stickers, chipboard and ephemera, including two sheets of washi stickers from 49 and Market that I bought for the Scottish album and didn't use.

I've pulled a few sets of alphabet stickers but I will mostly choose these as I go along, as well as using my Silhouette or Big Shot for some of my titles. I've got an assortment of journalling cards and more washi tape than I will probably use in the end. After I've made a few pages I'll know which tapes I'm drawn to and which ones I might end up rejecting and returning to my stash.

Finally, I have an assortment of travel-themed stamps, a globe die and a stencil which I can repeat across the album without fear of running out.

I'm sure to add more pieces once I start making pages; in particular I have no enamel dots, gems or mist in this selection. Each time I use something I will add it to my kit so that I can repeat it on further pages. It's a strategy that I've been using with travel albums for some years and a method that works for me.