A Trip Around California With Nature Print Paper

N.B. This post is NOT sponsored. I just love this paper! You can buy it here if you'd like to give it a try!

We just had the most amazing family holiday of our lives! We covered San Fransisco, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park, LA and LA Disneyland, Santa Barbara (where we stayed in a yurt with ocean views!), Los Padres National Forest, Morro Bay, Ragged Point/Big Sur and Monterey! Of course, most people take photos of their holidays but my recent love of Nature Print Paper led me to do something as well as taking pictures. So here are our memories in print. If you haven't already - please also look at my post six weeks ago where I used Nature Print Paper on our trip to Scotland and I talk a little more about how Nature Print Paper works.

Lake Tahoe

Memories of an afternoon horse riding (we borrowed a skull from the horse riding centre to make this original print!)

A Fussball table from our hotel. Yes, you really can use anything that creates a shadow!

Yosemite

We spent a day on bikes, cycling around the most beautiful place on earth (at least one of them!) and collected random bits from here and there as we went (as all young kids do). At the end of the day, we returned to our campsite and made some prints. Because the sun was low at this time of day, we had some interesting shapes. See the pine cone picture. I actually really like its abstract shapes created by the shadows of the pine cones that were cast over the paper. It is also worth noting that in times when we were not able to put the paper in water (which is required to 'develop' the prints), we just put them back in the envelope and printed them at a later time. Generally this was successful though I found a couple of prints that I had missed and had been sitting there for a couple of weeks and, although they came out, the image was not as strong as it usually is.

Prints from our yurt just outside Santa Barbara

This place was magical. It was a six mile drive up a dirt track right to the top of a mountain. The view was breathtaking, Every morning, we sat there watching hummingbirds feeding on the nectar in the flowers around the yurt. Of course, we had to make some memories of the hummingbirds' favorite flowers and the things we found on the beach at the end of the dirt road - as well as around the yurt.

Our tour up Route 1 - California's Coastal Highway

On our night at Ragged Point, which marks the beginning of the spectacularly beautiful cliff-side road that finally took us back to San Jose, we stayed on the very top (and edge!) of a cliff. We had picked up a few things on our day's journey; where we had eaten a picnic on a beach at Morro Bay and visited the elephants seals that can be found on a beach up the coast too. We made some prints in our little terrace garden with one of the best views of the holiday.

But what to do with all these prints?

We are just back from this adventure and, with jet-lag and kids straight back to school, I haven't been able to do anything with them yet.... but here is a picture of a couple of our favourite prints from our visit to Scotland in July. I love the fact that you can print anything at all - man made or natural - and it comes together in a cohesive display through the prints.

Great news to anyone who lives outside of the U.S. because Nature Print Paper now ship internationally. *I am not being paid to say this. I genuinely love this stuff!

If you'd like to know anything more about my trip or the paper please feel free to comment below. Or email at the usual address!

#natureprints #natureplay #travel #familytravel #summerholiday #naturecrafts