This month I am doing a four part series on the California Missions and I thought I would take the opportunity to show you a craft project that I did a few years ago.  As previously mentioned, in the California Mission Travel post, there are 21 missions that were established by the Junipero Serra along the coastline of California to convert the Native Americans to Christianity.  When we lived in California as a small child our family visited many of the missions, in fact the San Fernando Mission was located a few miles from my childhood home in the San Fernando Valley.  Several years later when I had my own family we often visited the Missions that were located near our weekend travel destinations.  In fact, at one point it became our quest to visit ALL the Missions!  So, over the next few years we visited 16 out of the 21 Missions before we had moved to the Midwest.  (Our plan is to visit those 5 last remaining Missions when we return to California for summer vacations!!)

When visiting the Missions we would stop in the gift store to buy souvenirs, sometimes a book or saint holy cards and I always bought a medal from that particular Mission and so far I have collected the 16 medals.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them; I thought maybe I would put them on a charm bracelet.  I knew that I wanted to create something special to remember the Missions that were an important part of our lives in California.  Then when we moved into our new house in the Midwest I came up with a great idea!  I remembered during one of our visits to the Missions that I had bought a map of California showing the location of the 21 Missions and I decided it would be perfect for what I was planning. 

I bought an inexpensive frame to fit the size of the map, it was an irregular sized frame but I was able to find one that worked.  The map had a blank space around the edge and this is where I hot glued the Mission medals to the glass of the frame making sure to leave an empty spot for the ones that we were missing.  It was a simple craft project and it now hangs on the wall of our home next to our bookcase filled with our California memorabilia and it will forever bring back memories of family trips to the California Missions.