How to Display Your Travel Mementos in a Minimalist Space- Catherine

In this post, guest writer Catherine talks about some creative ideas on how to display your travel souvenirs.

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If you love traveling, odds are that you have picked up some trinkets during your travels. However, if you also like having a minimalist space, you may worry about displaying your travel souvenirs. If you’re looking for minimalist souvenir display ideas, here are a few ideas to get your display project going.

Choose Your Trinkets Carefully

The key to enacting tasteful souvenir display ideas is to buy tasteful souvenirs. Although you may be tempted to buy a tacky memento while you are traveling, think about what will happen once it’s in your home. For example, if you’re traveling in Italy, there are a lot of cheesy espresso glasses available. However, unless you routinely drink espresso at home, there is really no need for you to buy one of these souvenir glasses, Also, they likely will not match the decor scheme that you have going on.

While you’re traveling, try to look for someplace like a jewelry store or a store that has products with screen printing on them. A jewelry store that has products relevant to local culture or aesthetics is a great way to find a piece that you may be able to wear routinely, and when you’re not wearing it you can easily store it away or even hang it as decor.

A store that offers screen printed items could have products such as clothing, scarves, or other kinds of textiles that you can easily display in a few different ways. You can create a blanket or pillow out of the various designs, or you can use the material as the backdrop in a picture frame or shadow box.

Another type of item to look for is homeware items like bowls, plates, and trays. For items like this, it’s a good idea before your trip to think about what you could use or have room for in your home. For example, if you know you have more than enough plates, but you could use a serving bowl, you can look for one while you are abroad.

Trying to purchase items that fit within the color palette of your home is another great souvenir display ideas. Some cities or countries are known for a unique color palette, which may make this more difficult, but many others are known for a specific style that can exist regardless of the color of an item. In this case, it’s a good idea to think before your trip about what exactly you’ll need.

You should also look for items that are both display pieces and usable, such as paperweights or bookends. These things can easily be added to a desk or bookshelf without creating unnecessary clutter.

Get Smaller Models

If while you were abroad you had a great experience, but couldn’t find a good souvenir to represent the event, you can buy something to remember the occasion once you get home. This way, you can ensure that no matter what souvenir display ideas you have, this will fit into it. For example, if when you were traveling you found a car for rent that was a beautiful classic car, you could look into getting a model of it to display in your home. Classic cars often have models online that you can find in a multitude of sizes, so no matter how much space you have available, you can display your memory.

Building a Display

If you want to build a dedicated display for your souvenirs, installing shelving or bookshelves can work as souvenir display ideas. If you’re in the process of looking to renovate your home, it can be a good idea to take into account whether or not you’ll need a spot to display travel mementos. If you travel routinely, it’s a good idea to create a space specifically for this so you don’t end up cluttering other parts of your home. Many home remodeling contractors will be amenable to your souvenir display ideas and will work with you to bring your vision to life.

Having a dedicated shelving area for your trinkets can help you tamper down on buying anything unnecessary while you’re traveling as well. If you know that there is only so much shelf space open, you will know that no matter how much you think you want a large souvenir, you simply don’t have the room for it, which will make you buy something smaller and better.

If you dedicated a large portion of your renovation budget to something more essential, like a roof repair, you can easily DIY a display area as well. Buying a pre-made shelving unit or other prefabricated shelves may be less custom, but you can still use them to make your display area all your own.

Frame Mementos

A great way to keep clutter away but still have a display of your travel mementos is to put them in frames or shadow boxes. As mentioned above, you can use a textile scrap like a cut-up screen printed shirt as a backdrop to your shadowbox or frame as a form of souvenir display ideas. You can print out your favorite photos from the trip and keep any ticket stubs, important receipts, or programs from your trip.

For example, if you plan a trip with the specific purpose of going to see a public speaker that you really admire, you can center an entire shadowbox around that. You can use a shirt from the speaking event as the background of the box, or if you don’t want to waste money on a t-shirt you won’t wear, you can use a large print of a photo you took at the event as the background. Depending on the size of the frame you’re using, you could even use the font of the program or a few pages from it as the background. If there is a quote from the speaking event that you really liked, you can cut out the quote and include that in your shadowbox or frame as well, creating a collage effect.

A plus of these types of souvenir display ideas is that you can really customize it to make it work for your space. If you look on a website like Pinterest, there will be many cheesy shadowbox examples, but you don’t have to mimic those examples. Stick to the color palette of your room and choose tasteful pieces to display and your mementos will look more like art than saved up ticket stubs or a cut-up program from a public speaker’s event.

Make It Shine

The best souvenir display ideas mean almost nothing if you can’t see the items that you are displaying. Make sure that you are taking advantage of your lighting and using it to highlight your souvenirs. If your display is near a window and usually has adequate light during the day, consider installing lights that are powered by solar energy so that at night you do not lose the ability to see what you’ve collected on your travels.

If you have a shelving display, you can look into LED light strips, which can be attached under a shelf and are out of sight until they’re turned on. Many strip lights are also controlled by a remote and have multiple color settings, so you have even more control over the lighting options for your souvenir display.

Make Memory Boxes

If you’re looking for souvenir display ideas that don’t involve cluttering your space, consider making memory boxes to use as both storage and display items. A great way to do this is to use faux books to display that will hide away the clutter from your travels. This is great if you have a sentimental edge and want to keep things like tickets and programs but don’t want to display them anywhere. You can make the “name” on the spine of the book either the place where you visited, a specific thing that you loved about that place, or a destination you visited. For example, if you visited Tuscany and stayed in a villa with a specific name, you could put that on the spine of the book. That way it may look less like a false book and more like a real book. There are pre-made false books, but there are also many online tutorials on how to create your own false book.

Repurpose Items

When you’re buying a souvenir, you don’t necessarily have to use it for its intended purpose. Upcycling and repurposing items is a huge craze right now, and there are countless tutorials online on how to reuse items to give them a new life.

In fact, in this article, repurposing an item has already been discussed — reusing a t-shirt as the background to a shadow box or frame. Textiles have a number of ways to be reused, and here are a few examples not already discussed:

• Create a Patchwork. You can take shirts from your various travels and create a patchwork quilt. A quilt like this has both a practical use as well as holding sentimental value.
• Create Art. If you take scraps of fabric that you collect on your travels, you can easily create art using the fabric. Create hanging art that you can update and change by stretching a piece of fabric in an embroidery hoop and hanging it from a piece of fishing line. You can use multiple hoops to create a minimalist art piece that you can easily update, add to, or subtract from.

If you love plants, you can repurpose many containers that you purchase while traveling into planters. Anything that can hold soil can become a planter, like a glass, mug, teacup, or any other type of container. Make sure that if you decide to convert something that is not meant to be a planter into a planter that you include adequate drainage for your plants. If there is not a hole in the bottom of the container, your plants may suffer from root rot since the water you put in the plant does not have an opportunity to dry. You can easily remedy this by adding a few inches of pebbles to the bottom of your container. Make sure that there is enough room between the stones not only for any water that the soil can’t absorb but also enough space for air pockets to form to give the water a chance to evaporate. Make sure to also take pest control into account when it comes to managing a plant’s health and wellbeing. To avoid having a plant become infected by pests, use a store-bought anti-pest spray or create your own DIY version.

Dried Flowers

If the location where you’re traveling allows you to pick flowers to bring home during your visit, you can easily press them during your journey back home by putting them between the pages of a book or journal. Once you get home, you can quite a few different DIY crafts out of your pressed flowers. Here are a few ways to use your dried flowers:

• Include Them in Your Display Frames. Dried flowers make a great addition to shadow boxes or picture frames. If you buy a frame that has a clear back instead of a solid back, using dried flowers around your photo can really make it pop.
• Create Coasters. One common way to use dried flowers is to create a resin coaster and place the flowers in there. The average craft store will have all of the supplies needed to create a coaster, and there are many tutorials online on how to create your own coasters.
• Create a Tray. If you already have a display tray in your home, you can add a layer of dried flowers and resin over the bottom to add a subtle nod to your travels to your existing decor.

Before you do this, make sure that you are allowed to bring plants from the place where you’re traveling from. Some countries will not allow you to transport living flowers over the border, but you will have to check the specific laws and regulations before trying to bring flowers home with you.

You can show that you are well-traveled without cluttering up your space with knickknacks and souvenirs. It may take some planning before you even go on your trip to evaluate what you want to buy while you’re abroad, but it is possible to stay minimalist while showing off what you have purchased abroad.