Have you seen those cute, vintage luggage and travel stickers? I don’t mean luggage tags (we have those already!) I mean the tourist-y collectible stickers with bright images and place names on them. You slap them on your suitcase, or your laptop or notebook, and share your adventures with the world! They’re also a great little souvenir or memento from your travels. It seemed like a fun idea to add to our spring break family road trip plan. I like the way it takes the idea of a “family vacation” to a new level as a “family adventure.”

So I made one for us.

I’d seen reproduction travel stickers before in scrapbooking supplies, but was sort of introduced to the idea of using them in-real-life (vs in scrapbook design or smashbooks!) from the movie Aloha, with Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone. I’m not recommending the movie. It was ok, but I wouldn’t bother seeing it again. But in the movie, his laptop was covered in stickers and she asked why. He said, “One for every adventure.” And there was one for every country/state/city he’d been to for work.

Rather than make one for each place we visited, I made one for our road trip as a packaged deal. One big adventure! {smile} I used Microsoft Publisher because I’m very familiar with it. But you could have easily used PicMonkey as well. (PicMonkey is my favorite for regular photos, and what I use for all my blog graphics.) This was a pretty simple project.

STEP 1: DECIDE YOUR TRAVEL STICKER SHAPE

This is kinda important because it determines what you’ll want to use to print your stickers. I was using my home computer so the choices were:

• Use pre-formatted printable labels so I didn’t have to cut them out.
• Use 8.5×11 blank sticker paper and cut each one out individually.

 

Total slacker-mom here, so I went with the first choice.

Avery has an entire line of print-to-the-edge labels in different shapes for small business marketing and they always do well in my printer, so I went with the biggest 2″ white circles I could find on glossy paper since my photo printer does a great job with it. Circles just seemed more fun than squares for me right now. Totally personal preference.

Pay close attention to the description if you order online, these are not big packages of labels. Mine is only 15 sheets. That’s plenty for a family project. But usually, when you mess up printing labels, you mess up a whole sheet at a time, so just be aware when comparing prices. If you’re going with blank 8.5×11 sticker paper, I know the Avery sheets are good quality, and print and stick well, but you’ll probably have less issue with it pulling through your printer so any brand might be fine. I ordered a package of Staples brand to try for a different project and I’ll let you know how it goes.

STEP 2: DESIGN YOUR TRAVEL STICKER IMAGE

Since our trip is about the journey more than the destination, I didn’t want to zero in on one particular place. So I found a map of the whole USA and cropped it down to our size and shape–focusing on the south-western section since that’s where we’d be. When scanning for images, I was looking for colors more than anything. I wanted brighter, primary colors for this project because I wanted it to appeal to the kids. For myself, I would have been looking for a mellow, vintage palette.

The border is actually a second image that I recolored and layered on my map. I just sized the map circle to fit within the orange border circle.

Then I added a text box for the words and used STENCIL font.

I used Pinterest and searched for “free printable maps” to find our travel sticker image. I hunted through a lot of junk and expired links to find what I wanted. You can find some good links over at my Pinterest board On the Road Again or on Teaching History and Geography to get started–but always pay attention to sources and copyright!

Group your images and your text boxes into one object and save as a picture file. I saved as a .jpg because that’s easy to use in Microsoft office applications.

STEP 3: TRANSFER YOUR TRAVEL STICKER DESIGN TO YOUR LABEL TEMPLATE

I downloaded the Avery template 22807 from their website as a Word document. (Avery Item template 22807) Then I inserted my image as a picture in the 12 circles. {smile}

STEP 4: PRINT YOUR TRAVEL STICKERS

This is pretty self-explanatory, but always, always, always be sure to print a test/template on plain paper and make sure it lines up with your label sheet before running your labels through the printer. Like I mentioned, Avery sheets have always worked well for me with our printer. I only needed four (3 for the kids and one for our family travel journal) but it’s always nice to have a few extras until the trip is over.

BTW: We use this Canon MX 922 at home and LOVE IT, although it’s a bit of an ink hog. It does every function I’ve ever needed for our home office. (Psss…and it’s on sale 50% off at the moment…) 

 

I tucked them away to give the kiddos as we head out. They’ll be able to slap them right on their Road Trip Activity Cases, and start their own little adventure collection!

Do you have any printing tips? Or tips for saving ink? My printer does a beautiful job with image quality, but it’s definitely an ink guzzler.