Personalized Map for the Travel Loving Couple

Personalized Travel Map

It's June! Wedding season! Just when I thought we were done with weddings for a while, we had one in May and one just last week! Here is my personalized wedding present for each couple--I've seen it done in various ways by different people. It's a really simple, cost-effective way to make a one-of-a-kind wedding gift for those special couples in your life who love to travel. I am almost tempted to create one for myself, though my hubby already bought us the National Geographic version a while back.

For this project I employed the skills of my hubby, who helped create the map. We searched online to find a jpeg of a world map--it was hard to find one that not only had country borders, let alone major cities, so in the end I went with a blank map with only outlines of the continents. Only later would I have the idea to create map pins that would have the names of cities on them. Hubby then used PhotoShop to change the map colors to gray and white, and we added the couple's names to the bottom, along with the saying "Our World Adventures."

We took this file on a zip drive to our local Kinko's, where they had a special half-off deal on posters. They took my world map jpeg and enlarged it to 18 x 24 inches, then mounted it on sturdy foam board. I went to Joann's where, of course, they were having a huge sale on all their frames, so I picked up a couple of 18 x 24 inch poster frames.

Even without pins the map already looks good!

The next step was to create my map pins. For this I bought a box of extra long satin pins from Joann's, along with this cool adhesive kraft paper I found serendipitously. With my handy Fiskar's paper trimmer I cut this sticker paper into 2 inch by 0.25 inch strips. I folded them in half and then cut the ends to make flag banners. I peeled off the adhesive backing and attached each flag to a pin by just sticking both halves together. With the self adhesive paper there was no gluing necessary, which was a great time saver. Only thing left to do was write down the names of various cities I knew that these couples had traveled to. For the special cities, like where the couple got engaged or married I placed tiny hearts on the flags.

For the couple's future travels, I enclosed blank flag pins in a tin case I had lying around and in the original plastic case that the pins came in. I created a special label for each.

Last but not least--personalized wrapping paper! Super simple--just took kraft paper I had in a roll and started stamping away. Then used large sticker letters to spell out the couple's names. Tah dah!