If you’re an avid traveler, you likely have mementos, trinkets, and souvenirs from all your trips strewn across your home, stuffed haphazardly in drawers and cabinets. Maybe you just got back from your latest trip abroad with a few more things, and now you’re finally thinking to yourself, “What should I do with all this stuff?”.
If you’re looking for a way to organize your mementos without just stuffing them in the back of your closet, then check out these five awesome ideas.
- Create a memento board
A memento board is a simple, straightforward way to display many of the souvenirs from your travels in a single place. It’s best to create a memento board with photos, travel guides, tickets, and other items that you can easily pin to a flat surface. However, it wouldn’t be hard to also hang little trinkets like necklaces, bracelets, and keys, too.
Actually creating a memento board is pretty simple: just go out and purchase a corkboard, arrange your travel souvenirs on the board to your liking, and hang it up somewhere in your living space! An empty wall in the hallway or a nook over your desk are both great places to hang it.
- Put them on your coffee table
Of course anyone could put their travel mementos on top of their coffee table, but have you considered putting them in the tabletop? Putting your souvenirs underneath a glass tabletop is a fun way to display them for yourself and any potential guests.
The glass protects your photos, ticket stubs, or whatever else you decide to put in there, and the mementos add some character to the table, making it a one-of-a-kind piece.
To achieve this, you just have to go and purchase any coffee table with a glass tabletop—or, if you already have a coffee table sitting in your living room and don’t feel like buying a new one, you could look around for a glass top-piece that fits the current table.
- Get a photo ornament
If you want to make something festive out of your travel pictures, then you should order a custom photo ornament. Photo ornaments are great for commemorating your most treasured travel memories, as they turn any photo into an item with practical use.
You can break the ornaments out every holiday season and hang them on the tree, or you can just keep them around to remind you of memories made while abroad. Photo ornaments are easy to personalize and order, and they make the perfect gift for a close friend or family member.
- Put a scrapbook together
The scrapbook is a classic when it comes to collecting the memories and mementos from one’s travels. In it, you can collect all sorts of photos, texts, and other materials from your trip and organize them in a single compact book.
Plus it doesn’t require very much to start a scrapbook. All you need is a notebook, a pen, some glue or tape, and then any of the materials from your travels that you’d like to include in it.
Of course, that’s just the bare minimum—there are all kinds of resources and examples out there that cater to the craftiest of scrapbookers. Coincidentally, one of the primary benefits of scrapbooking is that it just offers you so much flexibility in how you can organize your mementos.
- Edit a travel video
Travel videos have become a popular way to share your adventures now that almost everyone has access to a high-definition phone camera and a social media account.
Maybe you took a ton of videos on your last trip but now have no idea what to do with them; or, maybe there are some things on your upcoming trip that you know you’re going to want to capture on video. Either way, compiling the footage and editing together a travel video is the perfect way to make your memories into something exciting and dynamic.
Although it requires a little editing know-how, it doesn’t have to be difficult to put a video together. Just do some research online, watch other travel videos for inspiration, find some simple editing tools, and you’ll be on the right path.
Memories are precious, and the tiniest souvenir can bring back memories of lying on a picturesque beach or hiking through a beautiful forest. That’s why you shouldn’t just tuck your travel mementos away when you arrive back home, but instead incorporate them into something else. The ways you could go about doing that are virtually endless.