Travel Keepsake Boxes

I used to love scrapbooking, but I haven’t put together a book in a few years (probably because photobooks are so much easier). Even though I haven’t done any scrapbooking lately, I’m still in the habit of saving every ticket/pamphlet/memento…just in case. That means have manila envelopes full memorabilia from the past few years.

One day while browsing Pinterest I saw a pin for travel keepsake boxes. The travel keepsake box idea is from Martha Stewart and you can see the original here. Basically, you paint a wooden box, stencil the destination on the side, and fill it with mementos from your trip.

I decided to make a London box and Paris box to hold all the tickets, pamphlets, pictures and scraps from our trip. I bought two of these wooden boxes from Michael’s – originally $19.99, but only $12 with coupon.

I painted the London box robin’s egg blue and painted the Paris box navy. Then I used my Cricut (did I mention that I bought an Expression 2?) and some scrap vinyl to cut out “LONDON” and “PARIS”. I used the scissors from the Cricut Tools Basic Set to cut the vinyl the same size as my wood box (it helps to keep the letters straight when placing the vinyl). Then I peeled away the lettering to create a stencil and used transfer tape to place it on the side of my box. Although the scraper tool is meant to clean the cutting mat, it also helps smooth out the vinyl on your surface.

First I painted a thin coat of the original color to prevent any bleeding. This method worked really well when I painted the stripes on my office walls, so I decided to try it out on a smaller scale. After that dried, I painted two coats of white paint over the stencil.

As soon as I finished painting the second coat, I peeled the vinyl off so I’d get a nice clean line. I used the weeder to peel off the smaller pieces– way easier than using a toothpick (my old method)! The white paint only bled under the vinyl in one spot, so painting a coat of the original color first definitely worked well.

Once the paint was dry I filled my box with our plane tickets, entry tickets, pamphlets that we picked up from each stop, printed copies of my blog recaps, and pictures.

The boxes are now sitting on the entertainment center in the living room. I love that I can see them all the time and I catch myself reminiscing about our trip daily.