Oh the places we'll go...

A few weeks ago I was in Memories Galore looking for paper for my cruise scrapbook, and I saw these awesome map pages.  Instantly I thought I should make a personalized map for my craft room to display all the places Dave and I have been individually and together.  It's not an original idea by far, but it has mucho sentimentality with a poco price tag.

Because I was in a scrapbooking store where everything magically fits into a 12x12 box, I had to choose from either the whole country on one 12x12 page, which was too small, or two separate pages splitting the country right down the middle.  The second choice seemed like the best idea even though I'd have to figure out a way to fuse them together to make a big map, or keep them separate but make it look like I did it on purpose. :)

Once something like that is in my head, it's hard for me to turn it off, so when Bonnie, Ashley, and I went to Ikea, one of the must-finds on my list was a frame to use for my map project.  I thought maybe I could buy a cheap white frame, remove the glass, and add cork instead of the cardboard backer - then adhere the map to the cork and it would be all ready for my pushpins!  But Ikea only has cheap frames in 8x10 or less, and the size I needed was like $40.  Not a very Ikea-ish price tag, right?  Fortch, we found 15x25 corkboards, and I put them side by side, trying to picture them hanging side by side on the wall, each with half the country displayed.  Looked good in my head, so I got Bonnie and Ashley's creative approvals, and into the cart they went! 

The next day after a super-healthy lunch at Five Guys, Dave and I went to Office Depot to search for the perfect pins.  I was thinking I'd find sewing pins but not the short, fat ones I needed...but lo and behold, there they were:  Map Pins!  Haha, it's like they knew I was coming! :)  I had everything I needed, so when we got home, I got to work on my maps!

I bought the white paint thinking I'd paint the frames of the corkboards...but i decided against it because all the furniture in the craft room is unstained pine.  Left them au naturel.

Since the pack of map pins came with three colors, we thought it would be fun to mark places we've both been individually or with our families, in addition to places we've visited together.   

 Dave's travels are marked with black pins, mine with red, and ours with white

We got to work tonight hanging up the maps.  Here they are! 

Every map needs a legend:

I picked up this map of the Bahamas on our cruise, so I pulled it out of the scrapbook box and used it to mark Nassau and Freeport.

We're missing Alaska because none of the maps I found included it.  Alaska and Hawaii are so neglected in the US map industry.  So we'll be hitting up Uncle Bob and Aunt Louise in Fairbanks to be on the lookout for a postcard-sized map to fill that empty space on the west coast board.

Now I'm sure you've noticed that the East Coast map is waaaaayy more populated than the West Coast and the middle of the country.  This exercise made it painfully obvious that we need to branch out and get off the Eastern Seaboard when we vacation...so in 2011 we've made a deal to visit the middle of the country.  Will it be Chicago?  Yellowstone?  St. Louis?  Little Rock?  I have a favorite already, but I'll share that later.