That Cool Park Map Art All Over Pinterest

 I pinned it too.  I was patiently waiting for someone to head down to the World and bring me back a stack of maps so I could make one for myself.  Then my sister went to Florida at the end of the summer and brought back the stash I needed... but I had no time to work on it.

Then finally I had the time!  I went to Pinterest to find whatever blog that photo was attached to and I got a big fat nothing. Apparently that blog has disappeared from the internet and I had to wing it.

Luckily, I've been scrapbooking and paper crafting since my first son was born a million years ago a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, so I had tools and some ideas on how I was going to approach this.



Stuff I used:
Multiple copies of all the park maps, including Disney Springs.
a 2" square puncher and/or a 2" hexagon punch (I made one for me and one for my sister)
Masking tape
Gray Stazon Ink pad
Foam dauber
Acid free cardstock
Acid free glue stick
pencil
ruler
11 x 14 picture frame

Take a look at all of your maps and decide which images you want to use.  Look at the front and the back.  Recognize early on that you're not going to be able to include the whole park name. Figure out which letters are the most important to you to use.

The paper these maps are printed on now is pretty thin and cheap.  It has to be!  They print millions of these a year, right?  So, knowing that my punches tend to rip thin paper, I put strips of masking tape on the other side of the map to bulk it up. Then I trimmed the map so I could punch out exactly the part that I wanted.

I did this like 30 times.  I made way more squares and hexagons than I needed.  I wanted to be able to fool around with the layout and swapping out pieces to get the colors and designs I wanted.

I drew faint pencil lines on the cardstock so I could line the squares up evenly, with the same amount of space around each tile. When I used the gluestick to glue them down, I liked the way they looked but I thought they needed more OOMPH.  So, when I started to play with the hexagons, I got out the ink pad and sponge dauber.  You can use any kind of ink pad, but with the glossy coating on the maps you run the risk of smearing ink.  Stazon dries pretty fast and doesn't rub off.  I used gray because I wanted to define the edges but didn't want the edge to be black and in your face.

So put the dauber on your finger and tap it on the ink pad to load it with ink,  Hold the hexagon or square at a 45 degree angle and rub the dauber along the edge.  If you change the angle, you can control how thick the ink edge is.

Here's the two sheets all done, pre-framing

If you look, you can see the slight outlining of the edges on the hexes.  It just makes them stand out from the white paper.

 And here it is hanging on the wall in my library.  I LOVE it.