August 02, 2011

Map Photo Frame Challenge

A few wonderful blogs (Young House Love, Bower Power, Emily Henderson, & Making a House a Home) issued a Pinterest challenge last week. The challenge was quite simple: actually MAKE something you've pinned!  I'm guilty of pinning lots of beautiful inspirations but never bringing them to life, so I was excited to join the challenge!

If you're not familiar with Pinterst, it's essentially a virtual bulletin board where you can save photos you find online and browse what other users are "pinning."  It's awesome, easy to use, and a great source of inspiration!  You need an invite from another member to join, so feel free to email me and I'll send one to you.

For the challenge, I decided to replicate this map photo frame that I pinned months ago. You may even recognize it from a previous post of my favorite map inspired projects.


map-picture-frame-mat

Before I jump into the tutorial, here's a peek at my version of this project:

 
DIYNewlyweds-Map-Photo-Frame-3b


It's a photo of Bermuda, framed in a map of Bermuda!  Ahhh, I love the concept!

Here's how I did it.  To make the matting, I started with an empty granola bar box to use as my base for the matting.  Then using PowerPoint, I drew the shape of my photo and the outside matting.  After playing around with rulers, levels, fractions, and division, I realized it was a lot easier to draw a 5"x7" box and 4"x5" box in PowerPoint than by hand!

measure-photo-mat

Then I spray glued my box template onto the cardboard and cut out the interior rectangle using an exacto knife.  To make things easier, first glue then cut.

diy-frame-matting

Then it was time to glue the map to the matting.  I played around with the map until I found the perfect portion of it to use in my frame.  This map had points of interest called out in text boxes, so I wanted to avoid them for this project.

map-mat

Once I got the position just right, I made a slight crease around the matting so I knew where I'd need to glue.  I turned the map over and spray glued the cardboard to the back of the map.

To cut out the inside, I cut diagonal lines in the inside rectangle:

cut-photo-mat

And folded over the cut flaps to create a smooth finish for the inside of the matting.

cut-frame-matting

After trimming excess, I got a pretty cool looking map mat!

map-frame-mat

First I placed it in a black frame, but I wasn't crazy about how that looked, so I spray painted the frame white.


DIYNewlyweds-Map-Photo-Frame-4b
Next time, I might make the matting a little thicker to show off more of the map. I have yet to hang this frame up, but I have a special place in mind for it (it's actually another project I'm working on based on more inspiration I found on Pinterest so stay tuned! Update: check out my travel gallery wall!) 

DIYNewlyweds-Map-Photo-Frame-2b

I'm happy to have finally made something off of Pinterest!  I'm loving this map photo frame and it's a great reminder of our Bermuda vacation.  Have you brought any of your "pins" to life?

8 comments:

Kara @ June & Bear said...

I love map inspired projects. Looks great.

Mrs. Puma said...

I love this and have it pinned on Pinterest too! Great tutorial!

Go Haus Go said...

Too funny that you just left a comment. I was JUST admiring your map frame! I love it!

Angie said...

This is awesome! Love it love it love it!

Laura said...

Thanks for your nice comment! I love this project, too! I think I have it pinned as well. You did such a great job, and what a fun and beautiful memento!

Kelly said...

Nice! I love the matting tutorial piece, that Pin is another one on my to do list!

Kristi said...

Wonderful re-make! I have also pinned that map idea and have yet to make one-thanks for the wonderful tutorial!
Thanks for linking up-one thing-I was tired last night and forgot to add the rules/button code-could you come back and grab the code (if I put it here it reads it as HTML and just shows the button) to put on your post? Thanks I'd really appreciate it!
-Kristi
@ Creative Kristi

jen said...

Such a great idea. Had to share it with my readers. Keep up the good work.