Day 49 Crafting

Passport holder, originally uploaded by homemadeoriginals.

Today, I experimented with making a passport holder for a Christmas present. This is my third try at a closure (its a magnetic snap with the button added just as a decoration.

Thinking of passports reminds me of the visitor counter I added to my blog (look in right margin for Neocounter) just over two weeks ago. I have had visitors from 39 countries so far. I started wondering how many countries there are in the world so I did some research. Did you know the number of countries has nearly quadrupled since 1900 and tripled since 1946. The State Department's official count lists 193 independent states. (More countries to learn than there were in my youth and as I look at the State Department list I see many I am only vaguely familiar with, if that.) The world's newest country is Montenegro which became a country in June 2006 after splitting off from Serbia. Before that, East Timor became a nation in 2002 after getting independence from Indonesia. There have been 27 new nations since 1900, many of these coming from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

I was impressed with my count of 39, but obviously that only represents about 1/5 of the world's countries.