Arts and Crafts with Travel Maps

When we check in to a hotel in a foreign city, the first three questions we ask are:

Is breakfast included?

What's the WiFi password?

Do you have a map of the city?

Hey, I can see the Forum from here!

More often than not, we know the answer to #1 before we arrive. The answer to #2, if it's not already printed on a paper in the room, will be written down by the desk clerk on the little envelope that holds the room key card. And #3? Well, that's become one of our favorite - free - travel souvenirs. It's invaluable during the stay, giving us a nice lay-of-the-land with major attractions highlighted and a sense of what's within walking distance and what might require cab or ride on the subway (or Metro or Underground or Tube or U-Bahn, depending on what foreign city you're in). In fact, the best city maps with have the traditional map and the Metro lines. Then when the trip is over, the map slips easily into the pocket of a carry-on or backpack for the journey home.

For more than 25 years of traveling the world, we've hung onto those maps with a plan to...well...do something with them. Paper an entire room in the house? Impractical. Placemats? Wouldn't want them to get stained. Frame each one individually as a piece of artwork? No house of ours would have enough wall space for the number of frames we'd have to hang. But the idea of some kind of art was the right track.

(Map NOT to scale) Kiev and Lisbon aren't really that close.

We settled on decoupage. We started with three 2' x 3' sheets of plywood and wrapped the edges with decorative thin gold fabric as a kind of "picture frame". Then the hard part: deciding which maps to use from the scores we had accumulated over the years. We narrowed it down to the most colorful, unique, iconic, and exotic, tearing each map to highlight a city center, a major landmark, or simply an artistic design.

One of the boards fully decoupaged.

I won't get into the details of how to decoupage (you either already know how to do it, or you can Google it), but we placed each piece randomly, being careful to cover the board completely. We also included various admission tickets and event certificates. And as a finishing touch, we added the words LIVE, LOVE, TRAVEL. Attach a couple of sturdy screws and a wire on the back and your new travel souvenir is ready to hang. What were once taking up space in a closet, are now on display as a beautiful reminder of amazing trips around the world.

Finished products on display.