Hello everyone, Jil here. Odessa and I had fun making interactive flip out pages with the Memphis Season kit. Here is Odessa’s page before it’s opened up:

And here it is with the fold-out:

So cool! This is what Odessa has to say about it: “A fold out element seemed like the perfect way to document a very snowy Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I used some fun patterned papers from Memphis Season as a background in my Traveler’s Notebook and pulled colours from them when picking embellishments. I added the story of my photos to a simple tag that I also embellished with various stickers and chipboard from the kits.

I like to be a little silly when working on my albums so I took a fall 3×4 card from the Memphis Season Pocket Memory Keeping Kit and replaced leaves with snowflakes using some cute alpha stickers from the Memory Keeping Classified Kit. On the side I added a tab to make it a little more obvious to open it up! I always love the tags in the Cocoa Daisy kits and use them a ton in my memory keeping.

I made the fold out by cutting down some of the papers from the Memphis Season kits to a little over 3×4 so my photos would fit on them with a bit of space around them. On the backside I used washi to connect all of the panels and then adhered a second panel to the back to hide the washi hinges. It makes it look really clean and folds up so much nicer than just folded paper. I used a progression of shoe selfies over a few days to show how quickly the weather changed finished with a cranky looking photo of our cat Gnocchi. I added dates and simple embellishments to the photos to finish it off.”

This close up shows the altered journaling card/fold-out stack. There’s something magical about these interactive elements, and I can’t wait to follow Odessa’s design and make a multi-photo element myself. My own example features one fold-out for journaling and one playful flip-up. Here’s the page before it’s opened up:

And here’s the flip-up:

As you’ll see from the first photo, I used the adorable “grateful” clip to hold the main fold-out portion closed. Here it is when opened up:

The kit was perfect for a story I wanted to tell about my niece Zoe, who is a college student in the city where I live in Michigan. Her parents live up north, as does my mom, so periodically Zoe travels home with me, roughly a two hour trip, and we have the best conversations! I wanted my journaling to connect the themes of seasons of life, family, and autumn because these photos were taken recently, on my mom’s October birthday, and Zoe will soon graduate from college, and so this sweet season of our regular road trips will come to an end, just as the season of her childhood did. It’s possible to tell these longer, reflective stories in travelers notebooks–especially if you incorporate a fold-out element. This approach also allowed me to include a candid outtake from the photo session with my brother, niece, and mom. The gorgeous vellum leaves, the papers, and the die-cuts all help me tell the story! If you want to see this page in action, check out my YouTube channel for a video that also includes a quick walk-through of some of the other projects I’ve made with the Memphis Season kit.

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Jil Larson