Where we've been: Map Art project

We are still decorating our living room. This room continues to be the focus of our decorating lately.  I've even updated our living room, room board here. We are still deciding what color to paint or maybe even what wallpaper to put on the back of the bookcases. It's a work in progress and I will update you all soon, on what we have added.

I'm starting small first by adding little touches to the side table by the stairs. I knew I wanted to create this map art project when I first pinned it on Pinterest. It's a really easy project that you can do with kids too!

The materials you will need for the Map Art project are:
Shadow box
Map (or printed Google maps)
Scissors
Pencil
Scrapbooking tape
White paper (optional)

Here is the Pin-spiration:

I cannot find the original source, if you know where it is from, please pass along.

To start, purchase a shadow box frame that will fit in the space you want to display your Map Art project. I chose an 8 x 10 white shadow box frame from Hobby Lobby.

Next, list all of the places you have been together and don't forget where you met, where you were married, where you went on your honeymoon and where you live now. I was going to use one of our road maps that we have in our cars because we all use our phones now. But the problem I kept running into was that some of the locations were on the crease of the book. That wasn't going to work with my plan. So I decided to print out the maps from Google Maps. The only down side to this, is that every location has the Google A marker. However, now you don't have to cut up your original map and if you mess up cutting, you can print another one.

I printed about 15 different map locations to use. Just in case I didn't like the way one of them looked when cut out.

In Word, I created a quick layout of hearts. I found a clip art heart and stretched it and repeated it until I liked the layout with in an 8 x 10 size.

Then, I cut only one heart out. This was my template so you can see through where you want the placement of your map location. I wanted to make sure that all of my Google A's were centered.

I then put the heart back in the cut out, removed the larger paper full of printed hearts, to trace around the heart cut out. You following?

Then start cutting your (map) heart out. Har har!

Place all of the map hearts in the order you want.  They don't have to be in order of when you met, married, etc. I organized them by color.

I wanted to have the back of the shadow box in white. Using heavy weight white card stock I traced the size of the shadow box back and cut the paper to size. Then, use your scrapbook tape and secure your hearts to the paper.  I didn't measure, just eyeballed it.

It's done, it's personal, it's cute!

And it's so happy sitting in our living room. We don't know if this is it's final resting place, but it works for now.

We are hoping to make it to some new locations in the future. I will totally make another Map Art project, sometimes two is better than one, right?

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What heart art or map art have you created lately?