Postcards, magnets, tickets – everyone has their own way of bringing travel memories home. This year, we discovered something completely different: travel stamps as an unconventional way to collect travel memories.
Instead of ready-made souvenirs, we started creating our own little stamps by capturing fragments of the places that caught our attention. An ornate door handle, a piece of an old manhole cover, an inscription on a wall, a fountain detail, or a pattern on a door – anything can become a travel stamp.
All it takes is a sheet of paper and a bit of mindfulness to turn ordinary city details into unique vacation memories. It’s a bit like urban treasure hunting – suddenly you start looking down at the ground and up at the walls differently, instead of just ticking off the next landmarks.
What do you need?
🩶 A kneaded eraser (or any soft modeling material)
🖋️ An ink pad
📖 A notebook or sketchbook with thicker pages
That’s it. It takes almost no space in your backpack, but it brings a surprising amount of fun.
How to do it?
- Before heading out into the city, pack a simple kit: a notebook or loose sheets of paper, an ink pad, and a soft piece of bread dough (yes, really—like a bread eraser). This way, you can create your travel stamps on the go, whenever something catches your eye.
- Look for interesting textures – an ornament, inscription, pattern, or piece of relief.
- Press the bread dough gently onto the surface so it picks up the texture.
- Lightly cover the imprint with ink from your stamp pad.
- Transfer the design onto your notebook.
- Optionally, note down where and when you found it.
💡 Tip: the best results come from small, clear, and well-defined details – especially recessed ones, because they tend to create the most readable, raised-looking stamps once transferred. Also keep in mind that some surfaces (especially old metal ones) may leave tiny traces of rust or dirt in the dough, and your fingers will get messy pretty quickly with ink and dust. That’s simply part of the process.
After a few days of travelling, you end up with a deeply personal collection of travel stamps – full of details most people would walk past without noticing.
What it’s actually like in practice
We won’t pretend it’s as easy as it looks in Instagram reels. 😉
The first attempts are often imperfect, prints come out uneven, and your hands quickly turn blue from the ink. Sometimes you’ll need to return to the same spot a few times to get a result you’re happy with.
But that’s exactly the beauty of it.
Instead of just passing by landmarks, you start paying attention to the smallest details. You look for patterns, experiment, make mistakes, and discover cities from a completely different perspective.
By the end of your trip, you’re left not only with a notebook full of unique imprints, but also with memories tied to the process of finding them. Often, it’s not the monument itself you remember most, but the story of how you noticed its most interesting detail.
It’s one of those simple ideas that makes travelling more mindful – and leaves you with a souvenir you simply can’t buy in any shop. 💙
Check out our ideas
🌼Other ideas for spring and summer crafts can be found in the Spring and Summer sections.
🎁 If you look for more DIY cards ideas check our Cards section.
✨ If you are looking for more creative activities for kids check our DIY with kids section.
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Nothing gives more satisfaction than doing something yourself. I haven’t even thought about DIY as my hobby, I’ve just done different “projects” when it was needed. Sometimes it’s a disguise for the Masquerade Party in kindergarten. Another time, cutting out the pumpkin and baking the witch’s fingers for Haloween. Or simply organizing holiday souvenirs. Now I decided to share my realizations with you. Let’s go it together!
