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When we travel, we bring back a lot of mementos. Things like ticket stubs, airline tickets, postcards and brochures. Most of that is slowly making its way into my scrapbooks (photos forthcoming!) But the rest of it ends up in ratty white envelopes.  That’s just not how I want to preserve them. We travel around the world, the last thing I want to see is museum tickets smashed inside a box. I want my future kids to thumb through them someday and marvel at all the things his/her cool parents did. And white envelopes just wouldn’t want to be very impressive.

I love old looking things like bundles of love letters, and treasures wrapped in brown paper packages tied up with string…these are a few of my favorite things! (couldn’t resist!)

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I just love the idea of preserving my memories to rediscover them down the road. I don’t really save a lot of things, but things like this really make me happy.

For a while, I’ve been looking for the right kind of envelope that would look classy, be functional and last through the years. I wanted something similar to this, but I couldn’t find them in the size I wanted. Plus I didn’t really like the orangey office-style color.
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But this week, I found something fun in Paper Source. We bought all of our wedding invitation supplies there, so I knew I could trust the quality.

I bought two packs of the A9 envelopes in the “paper bag” color. It almost looks like recycled or homemade paper. Loved it!

They were simple and elegant, and I didn’t want to mess too much with them, but I had to label them somehow. I just acquired a set of stencils from a friend and I’m in love with the font. It’s classy and fun.

So I got to work labeling them. First up was Italy.

I hated it. Especially the way the year looks at the top. Nothing popped. And duh! If these envelopes were upright in a box, I couldn’t read the label! I had to put the country at the TOP of the envelope. I’ll chalk that one up as “practice”. Let’s start over. This time, in pencil first!

Then I went over it with a black sharpie.

Then I used a cute little stamp in the lower right hand corner to put the date.

It’s definitely closer to what I had envisioned… but still didn’t pop.  This baby needs color!

I love Sharpies. Especially these ultra fine tip ones. I did a few trial runs on my “test” envelope to see how the colors looked on the brown background.

Yep. This would work.

Success! I think they look cute!

Here’s a few more I did tonight.

And most importantly, They’ll look great once filled with travel keepsakes and all lined up in a nice box.

What do you think? Will my non-existent future children like them?

How do you store travel keepsakes?