Heart Map Print

Hi lovely friends out there! Belated Happy Christmas!

I have had a very full-on past two weeks. If you read my previous post about the medicine basket, you are already aware that my hubby was ill for a week with this girl writing as his personal nurse. Once he got better, the nurse followed in his footsteps and started with a temperature. Never mind, nurse and patient are now in quite good health so we can leave that behind!

We had a great Christmas time with the family (Thank you Boarders! :0). We ate, played, laughed a lot and exchanged lovely presents!. We even managed to fit a trip to Ikea on the 27th with my sister-in-law! I’ve got two Expedit bookcases with which I’m hoping to put together something like what Jen at IheartOrganizing has done here. I’ve also bought one of those big white rugs that I’m hoping to stencil. I’m a little insecure about this one but we’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep you updated.

The main subject of my post today is something I’ve put together for one of the gifts we gave. Not an original idea, I’ve seen it going around on Pinterest but I don’t think I’ve actually pinned it because I couldn't find it again!.

I’ve found this beautiful frame from Laura Ashley (I like it so much that I’ll be getting one for myself!)

I was going to give the frame itself as a present but I decided to put together a heart map of the city where this couple are both from and two tiny red hearts just above the names of their respective birth towns.

First I did a print-screen of the city in Google maps but hubby thought it would look better with a map that would look more like the real paper ones so we found this Michelin website with maps we both liked.

I used Photoshop for creating the canvas in the size of the frame, cropping the heart shape and adding the two little red hearts but Photoshop is not strictly necessary, you could also print out the map and then cut the shape you want. (Please, let me know if you would still like me to put together a quick tutorial for this.)

This was the end result:

Do you like it? I was really pleased with it!

When the time for wrapping all the presents came, I decided to go with the same snowflakes I used for my dining-room artwork here and this is how they come out:

The only difference with the original snowflakes was that I didn’t cut the details in the centre and in its place I put some circular tags that I printed out with everyone’s names. I’ve glued everything together with regular PVC glue.

Now I need to go and start getting everything ready for Hogmanay! (This is a Scottish word for New Year’s Eve) We are hosting it here in our home and I’m already super excited. Bring on 2013!

(Pssss If I find a moment, I might post that Master-bedroom reveal I’ve been promising since I started blogging two months ago before the end of the year but don’t quote me on this one!)

Gaby X