Woman's One-of-a-Kind Way for Keeping Track of Her World Travels Goes Viral (Exclusive)

• Camila Zilveti travels the globe both for fun and as a professional pickleball player

• As the list of places she's visited grew, she decided she wanted a special way to remember each destination

• Recently, Zilveti went viral on TikTok for sharing how she keeps track of her travels, via a denim jacket she embroiders as she goes

With every country visited, Camila Zilveti adds a flag onto an oversized denim jacket – stitching on memories that will last a lifetime.

The idea for the jacket came to Zilveti, a pro pickleball player from Austin, Texas, during a trip to Mexico in 2021, when she realized how much downtime traveling offered. “Being all my friends’ ‘travel friend’ you can probably guess that all those scratch-off world maps and anything else in that realm has been gifted to me at some point or another and honestly I’ve loved all of them,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. 

However, the thought of an embroidered jacket that she could customize and wear excited her. “It was also an easy project to take along with me since I always need a jacket for traveling since airplanes love to freeze their cabins for some reason, so it was easy for me to wear it on the go as I worked on it,” Zilveti shares.

Since then, she has spent countless hours embroidering the countries she’s visited, turning a simple jacket into a tangible map tracking her experiences. With 89 countries already stitched, it’s no surprise that people are drawn to her creation, admiring the dedication behind every thread.

Her jacket recently went viral on TikTok, and requests to replicate it have flooded in. However, Zilveti remains committed to keeping her jacket a personal project. “I’d encourage anyone who wants one to make their own since it’s a great way to learn to embroider and you’ll feel double as proud to wear them,” she shares.

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Despite some challenges, such as the enormous task of embroidering large countries like Russia, or smaller ones like Andorra, she has found joy in overcoming obstacles. 

“Russia took me forever and it was so hard to keep the lines straight going across,” Zilveti reveals. “Lots of people commented asking how I did the tiny countries … but I made a tiny, baby stitch of whatever their flag's color is most prevalent of.”

What began as a simple hobby quickly evolved into a more ambitious project, and before long, Zilveti was outlining the world with needle and thread. 

Zilveti’s love for travel began in childhood, shaped by her parents’ nomadic lifestyle. Although she was born in California, Zilveti grew up in Guatemala, spending her formative years exploring the globe. 

“My mom is German and my dad is from Chile … we spent every single school holiday traveling to see relatives across the globe, which ended up to traveling for about three months of every year for my entire childhood,” Zilveti tells PEOPLE.

She labels her parents the “OG travel backpackers,” admitting that they are a few countries ahead of her. “They got unlucky in needing to repeat all the mainstream ones with my brother and I but my dad is approaching 100 countries, if he hasn’t hit it already," she says.

Zilveti’s family history of travel laid the foundation for her ongoing adventures, which continue to influence her work and passions. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in international relations and business, Zilveti moved into marketing. 

Being a professional pickleball player has contributed to her journeys, too, as she often travels domestically for tournaments. “For the last year-and-a-half I’ve spent every second week in a different city within the U.S.,” she explains. 

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But it’s her love for international exploration that drives her to visit new places whenever possible. “I ended the year going to 14 different countries in 2024,” Zilveti reflects, highlighting how her pickleball career has only added to her ever-growing list of destinations.

The last country Zilveti visited with her parents was Brazil; the next one she makes it to will depend on her pickleball schedule. “There’s a few on my list but the ‘Stans’ (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) are super high on my wish list,” she says. “Once you reach 89 countries, it gets kinda hard to find easy-to-reach countries that are new to visit.”

Before going pro, Zilveti met her now-husband, Brian, at a park playing pickleball. Just nine days later, the pair spontaneously booked a trip to the Bahamas. While her friends thought she was crazy for traveling with someone she barely knew at the time, her parents’ reaction — “How fun! Can we come?!” — gave her all the confidence she needed.

Now, having traveled together for three years, she and Brian are looking forward to having their wedding party in Vietnam in the fall. With every new country, her jacket becomes richer in both colors and stories, a wearable piece of her travels. 

Read the original article on People