Travel Themed Home Decor

I have been in the process of re-organizing our spare bedroom for the last few weeks and it’s slowly coming together.  This room is multi-functional, as it’s a guest bedroom, my craft room, post-wedding storage, and my gym (aka my treadmill).  That’s a lot of different spaces to fit into one room, but we have managed to make it work.  We painted the room a light but very bold green hue when we first moved in, and it pops against the white trim.  I guess you could say it’s the color of celery but I promise it looks much better than that sounds :)  The shelves for my craft area have been up for awhile now and they are full, but well-organized with all my boxes and containers from Ikea and Homegoods.  I still don’t know what to do on wall behind the treadmill, so I’m leaving that for last.

I have a lot of memorabilia and souvenirs that I have collected on some of my international trips so I decided to make the room “travel-themed”.  I have searched online for inspiration pictures of travel-themed rooms and all I could find were ideas for kids’ rooms!  Or pictures that were heavily focused on Indian culture.  Those don’t really help, so I guess I’ll be winging this on my own. 

Now I am working on the guest bedroom corner.  We put up a couple of white picture ledges above the bed a few weeks ago, as I bought a bunch of white and black frames at Ikea.  I can’t decide on which pictures to showcase - I want to choose one main picture each from Japan, Italy, Greece, and Mexico…and it’s taken me a good 3 weeks to narrow them down! 

I am also trying to incorporate some travel-themed quotes into the pictures and I realized tonight that is going to be a lot harder than I thought.  Unfortunately, the majority of my travel pictures are only saved in Shutterfly as I don’t have them on the laptop I use now.  So I can’t save the pictures in high resolution, and this is making it really difficult to design things in Microsoft Publisher, which I used ALL the time when designing wedding-related stuff.  I think I will have to print the photos on Shutterfly and then try printing on top of the photos using Publisher, if that makes any sense.  Here’s what I have designed so far:

This will be a 4x6 print with the quote “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” by St. Augustine on the background of a photo I took in Hiroshima, Japan.  The picture in Publisher is very pixel-y right now, so that’s why I need to print it from Shutterfly first.  The other design I have come up with is a quote by Mark Twain on the background of a photo I took in Greece early one morning:

I think I may want to come up with a few other quotes to add to the rest of the pictures for the other destinations, instead of just leaving the pictures blank.  I’m really hoping this project will come out successful as it took me a long time to work on each design.  Once these are done, this will complete one of the items under my craft/DIY category on my 101 in 1001 list – yay!