my germany adventure, as told through snacks

tower of ritter sport

I’m big on taking pictures, but as I mentioned in my doors of deutschland post, I didn’t take as many as usual on my Germany trip. Usually this leaves me feeling guilty when I arrive home, but this time was different – I had set goals for my trip from the start, and those goals had much more to do with exploring and learning the language than with documenting my journey. So I have no regrets about my less-than-enormous quantity of photos. (and, of course, I did take pictures of everything that I couldn’t pass by, like that tower of Ritter Sport.)

That being said, I really enjoyed this adventure and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to properly preserve my experience. While I always save giant folders filled with “memorabilia” from each trip – coasters, postcards, stickers, plastic ice cream spoons, church bulletins – I can tell from my drawers full of the stuff that I’m probably not very enthusiastic about sorting through it all and scrapbooking it. Sometimes it’s just time to admit to the obvious facts.

With a bag full of paper scraps, and a camera with not-so-many pictures, and a lack of desire to scrapbook, how am I supposed to save this adventure? That’s when I decided to center this project around the one thing I did photograph frequently: SNACKS.

Every day, I took pictures of meals and snacks to send to Brad, because I knew he’d be excited about them. I was excited about them, too! Rarely was something revolutionary, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t at least a little bit different than what I was used to. After accumulating these daily photos, it turns out I’m left with a “snack diary” of sorts on my phone.

selecting photos in adobe bridge

I decided this would be the perfect time to try something I’ve always wanted to make: a Blurb photo book. Plenty of pictures, but no scrapbooking required! Since I took the majority of my snack pictures with my phone, it was especially easy to select which I wanted to include in my book. They’re not perfect pictures, and they’re not even terribly exciting… but in chronological order they bring me so many memories. Each picture reminds me of that day’s adventures. “oh, there was my favorite sandwich from the cafe next to the school,” or “i ate that curry wurst after my visit to the bauhaus museum!”

A tip: When I’m selecting photos for a project or a blog post, I set my Adobe Bridge sort settings to “SORT BY: Rating” and then give all of my selected photos one star. This groups them all together and makes it easier to copy them to a new folder for editing. This can also be accomplished in iPhoto with the “Flag” function.

blurb booksmart screenshot

Once I had all the photos together in the same folder, I started my new book project in Blurb‘s Booksmart program… from there I’ll just click and drag the pictures until it looks like what I want! I’m not planning on including any text, and may instead write inside the book once it arrives. We’ll see what it looks like as I keep playing with it.

I’m planning to use the square 7×7″ book, since I don’t want it to be too big and I think the square format will be really cute.

As a special treat, there’s a discount right now on all Blurb books: Blurb 15% Off until September 9 with code: TAKE15! So whether you want to save a vacation like I am, or you’d like to get started on some gifts, I’m a big fan of this book-making process so far. Blurb suggests making a “thankful” book for parents/grandparents/loved ones around Thanksgiving, and that sounds like a beautiful gift!


AND p.s. that top picture of me overjoyed to find a giant tower of ritter sport? that picture was taken by the amazing Marie of Frogged Designs! Yes, I got to meet her! She is awesome at knitting, sewing, and finding good fabric stores, so meeting her was definitely a highlight of my trip. We got some good fabrics.


This post is partially sponsored by the Blurb custom book company, but I will be purchasing my own book and I can’t wait to finish it!