"Focus on the Journey, not the Destination"

My husband loves to travel. He's lived all over the world (England, the Middle East, the Caribbean...) and traveled to even more places. As for me, I didn't even see the ocean until I was 22, much less cross it. We never went on "vacation" growing up. We either drove 22 hours in our 1977 Chevy Impala ("The Boat") to Louisiana to visit our family or we went camping. And by camping I don't mean a nice RV in a campground. I mean middle-of-nowhere, sleep-in-a-tent (or on the ground), restroom-behind-a-tree camping.....my dad liked to really rough it.

But my husband really believes that a big part of who he is today he can attribute to having experienced so many different places in the world. It's important to him that we take our children places and let them experience different things. Unfortunately, like it is for most people, time and money are often roadblocks.

My husband is British, and although his immediate family lives here in the U.S., the rest of his family is still back in England. So we travel there every 2-3 years (depending on how long it takes us to save up!) for a visit. We try to go for at least 2 weeks and divide the time between visiting family and sightseeing. So far our sightseeing has been limited to the British Isles, but as our kids get older, we are hoping to use England as a jumping off point to see other sights in Europe. And my husband has a list of other places in the world he'd like to go, from South Africa to New Zealand and lots of places in between.

How is all this travel talk sewing/crafting related, you might ask? Well....what's the number one necessity when you travel out of the country? Your passport!!! When we travel, I usually carry some kind of backpack so that I can keep all the crap you need when you travel with kids at the ready, but still have my hands free for snapping photos...or herding my kids, whichever. And I carry all the travel documents.

A couple of months ago while wasting time surfing craft blogs, I stumbled across a cute tutorial for a passport cover over at bunnybum. And I thought to myself, what a great idea! That way when I pull out the passports at the airport, I can quickly identify which belongs to who with no effort. Plus, they just look cute!

We are getting ready to take a vacation to Banff in Canada this summer, so this week I took a little time to whip up some of these cute covers out of fabric scraps I had in my stash.

Mine is the one on the left, made with some Michael Miller "Peace Blossom" left over from a custom order; my daughter's is in the middle...Ariel, of course; and my son's on the left...using some of the "world traveler" fabric that I used when I redid his room (his room is decorated around maps and traveling).

I didn't make one for my husband....his passport is from the United Kingdom and is different from ours anyway.

This tutorial was really easy to follow and took no time at all. Two 6" by 12" scraps of fabric and about 10-15 minutes and you're done!

Bon Voyage!