What do you do with all those tickets?

So I had the key chains and  my husband , J, has the ticket stub collection.  Twenty plus years of tickets stubs shoved in an over sized  mug  first on his dresser, then on a self in our closet. There are tons of concerts and tons of sporting events. Some I was around for and a bunch I wasn't.

Close Up....Cardinal Games, Concerts, Blues Games

Again, why have a collection if you aren't going to look at it and enjoy it?

So last year for Father's day I had the brilliant idea of making a poster size collage out of all of them. I started out by very loosely laying them all out on the floor in as much of a rectangular shape as I could and measuring them. Then I went to Michaels armed with my 40% off coupon, as they have every week, and found a frame that was about the size I needed. Then I went to the framing counter and got a black mat to fit my frame. They have in stock and will cut for your plain old mat board. They don't have a ton of  choices but usually a clack, gray , off white  or white. Now if you want anything fancy, that'll cost you.

I wanted to have them in as close of chronological order as I could without looking all matchy-matchy. I wanted the colors, sizes, and shapes to all  blend together in a non-perfect way. Now I'm not going to lie, I had to sacrifice a few to get them into a already in stock frame. But when you have 30+ Cardinals game stubs, I let a couple of them go. I used photo square stickies to attach them in a non- permanent way at first but then they started to fall off so I had to reenforce them.  Now this hangs in the hallway of our finished basement and every time any of his friends comes over they look at it to see if they remember one of the concerts that they went to in high school.  Ahh...memory lane.

Here it is hanging downstairs in the hallway... sorry about the lights.