Saving Memories: Ticket Stubs & Other Memorabilia

If you are anything like me you are a pack-rat… a hoarder… a memory saver, if you will! From the time I was a little girl I can remember going to the movies with my family and having my Daddy pass me his ticket stub… because he knew I would want to save it for later. My husband learned early on about this infliction… did I ever mention how we met?

We were both employees at Marshall’s: myself in women’s accessories and my soon-to-be-hubby in women’s shoes and lingerie  You can tease him for that later… I always do ;). When it finally came time to part ways with Marshall’s my hubby went to put in his resignation… when he came out of the back office he had a brand new shiny name badge. This surprised me… he was quitting for a new job why would he have a NEW name badge? I asked him about it and he responded “Well I lost my old name badge and I knew you would want to scrapbook it… so I had them make me a new one”.

Isn’t he the sweetest?

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Either way I have YEARs of ticket stubs, receipts, napkins, name badges, paper Valentines, hotel stationary, magazine clippings, parking validation cards… little things that I’ve saved because they are important to me in some way. I never quite knew what to do with them however… I searched Pinterest for ideas and found several amazing ones:

But while all of these ideas were impressive they weren’t what I was searching for. I wanted to be able to see and read each and every ticket, not have them all jumbled up in a box or jar. I didn’t just want to save my ticket stubs… I wanted to save their stories, their memories. It wasn’t important that I went to see The Lion King in Denver, Colorado… it was important that my Dad and little Bro went with me. See what I mean?

I’ve always been a scrapbooker but I didn’t have the time or space to scrapbook every single ticket stub… that would be a bazillion and one pages! I wanted a way to collect all of my treasures in one place, with their stories, but I didn’t want to go off the deep end with embellishments and accessories.

The solution presented itself to me while I was cleaning out my office closet… which I’m still working on by the way. It’s almost finished… the cardboard bookcase and storage boxes definitely helped but I have one more project left! What did I find? A smash book that I had purchased (from Marshall’s ironically) on clearance and never found a use for! It was perfect… the whole purpose of a smash book is to SMASH it all in!

I decided on a simple combination of sharpies and pens… a sharpie to draw a bold arrow and colorful pens to write out my memories. I tried to place like items together… movies in series, plays I went to with my best friend, tickets from my hubby’s and my first date, first anniversary… I absolutely love having it all laid out.

Of course, since I’m a pack-rat I still am finding memorabilia stuffed in random places. I probably will for years… I never said I was an organized pack-rat! I never had one particular place to keep tickets so they tend to turn up in the weirdest places… whatever container I was using for a storage box at the time. It’s kind of fun though, like a treasure hunt. Never knowing when a memory is going to turn up!

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