I’ll admit it, I hoard every little ticket, receipt, brochure and any other paper bits that I come across when I’m travelling. I have shoeboxes packed to the brim with these souveniers from our travels over the past 3 years.

Some might consider it junk, but to me they are treasures waiting to be pored over in years to come, conjuring memories from far away places. As well as for nostalgic reasons, I’ve always thought they had papercrafting potential…

One such item is the standard airline-issue luggage tag. I used to just rip these off my bag and throw them away when I was packing for the next trip but I recently found a couple stashed away in my Shoebox of Random Paper Things Found Overseas (yep, that’s what I’m calling it now).

These labels have huge scrapbooking potential! They have a pattern (the stripes), in colours that go with everything (black & white), with an adhesive backing (aka, it’s already a sticker!) and best of all: they have some connection to a trip I’ve taken somewhere and I think it’s quite a subtle way to use travel ephemera in a scrapbooking layout or craft project. Oh, and they’re free, which is always a bonus

So here’s a couple of ways I used 2 different airline luggage labels that I had lying around…

{ the tag }

With the first one, I started with a kraft shipping tag and just cut up the label so I could just use the stripey barcode sections. Because they’re already backed with adhesive, they’re super easy to stick down and use as a base for the tag embellishments.

The next step is to layer on other patterned or coloured papers. I wanted to make the most of the barcode base instead of trying to disguise it as something else, which is why I added this striped paper in shades of blue and green. I decided to include another element of the airline baggage tag and cut out the AKL airport code for the destination because I knew I was going to include it in a layout about my trip back home.

Lastly, keep adding other embellishments until you’re happy. I stapled on a short piece of blue ric rac and another strip of patterned paper and then I was done…

Here’s how I used the tag in a layout (not my usual style but I like it)…

{ the layout }

With the second airline baggage label I wanted to use it directly on a layout in the same why you might use a sheet of patterned paper. Because the label tags are obviously much narrower than a normal sheet of paper, I decided to use my paper in strips, as it’s much easier to incorporate than trying to use larger blocks of paper (which is what I usually do).

As you can see I cut the papers to the size of the starburst sections on the Sassafras page. I had to use 4 separate pieces of the baggage label to fill the section on the right hand side of the photo – basically I used some post-it notes to create a pattern and then cut the barcodes out from that.

I think the barcode pattern works well with all the starburst lines on the Sassafrass page I’ve used as the base, as well as the lines in the photo. Any stripey paper could have worked in this layout, which makes it less obviously barcode-y I think (barcode-y is a word, right?!)

I keep thinking of other ways I could craft with these baggage labels, so I’ll try and use them in a few more projects.

Here a few other ideas:

• If you’re making an on-the-go scrapbook album during your travels, you could save the baggage labels, cut them into tape-sized strips and use them to stick down receipts or other bits & pieces into your album.
• Depending on where you’re flying, you could use the destination code section of the label as part of a layout title (I used it on my embellishment tag but that wasn’t really part of the layout text). I’d love to use it with some smaller coloured letter stickers as part of a longer title to brighten up the black & white lettering of the tag.
• If you were flying to a few destinations as part of one holiday, I think it would be fun to use them as tabs in a mini-album. I’d cut a larger rectangle around the destination code section and then fold it over the page edge in the album to see the different sections of the album (and a reminder of everywhere you visited!) at a glance.

I’m hoping to try out a few more of those ideas next time, I just need to book a few more flights first so I can collect some more baggage labels

Would you ever use one of them in a project? Or are they are bit barcode-y for you?

N x