How to save list of Sprites?

Dear coders I was wondering if someone may be able to point me in the direction of how I can save a list of sprites.

I have two scenes :

1 "Shop Scene" - holding all inventory items 2 "Start Scene"

I am able to code for my player to buy inventory items in 1 and transition to 2 with these inventory items as child sprites/gameobjects using a binary formatter.

However, on closing down the game entirely and reloading (I have a load function which works perfectly for health, mana, etc) the list of inventory gameobjects or sprites will not reload. I know that these are not serializable but after a lot of trial and error I've not been able to come up with a logical approach.

Would someone mind pointing me in the right direction as to how I may save this list of sprites that the player has brought?

Thanks!