Let's get lost together

I like the recent travel boards people have been doing on Pinterest, so I decided to try it for myself.   I think the picture below spanks mine, though.  What a world traveler!

via

It's almost a little smug, you know?  I'm thinking, "Okay, Carmen Sandiego, we get it!  You like to travel!"

 Reminds me of another pinterest thing that popped up lately:

But back to my twenty minute project! I'm not artsy enough to create something from scratch, but I found a gorgeous calendar featuring vintage maps for $20 at a local gift shop.  The cover was a print of Europe that I thought would work well for documenting our travels, and I figured the added bonus is that I can still use the rest of the calendar come 2013.

I bought a sticker book from the dollar bin at Target for summer school this year, and I realized yesterday that I could use a hole punch on the bottom stars to create little dots of color to indicate cities we have visited.

Really, there's no need for the blow by blow of this project, but I will anyway.  I just hole punched the star stickers in five different colors, one for each country that we visited (three together/ two separately).

Then, we just placed the dots on the different countries we've visited:

I created a little key for the bottom corner, cut out the map, and popped it in a frame.  Voila!  Easy, custom art for our office:

I like the idea of framing a map because Dan and I are always getting lost on our vacations together.  Even though he has a solid sense of direction, I inevitably want to visit some obscure  place, like a pastry shop I read about on Trip Advisor, so he has to do tons of map reading.  He's constantly threatening to give me "map lessons" since my sense of direction is so backwards, but I wriggle out of that by feeding his ego, "But, hon, I have you!"

Side note:  While I'm horrible at reading maps, I am the only one of the two of us who can fold them back up into the neat little rectangles.  Anyone else notice that about their significant other??  What is so hard about using the creases to fold it up again??  I do have to admit that I feel oddly smug when he spends ten minutes expertly navigating us through some complex city... and then has to sheepishly hand the map to me to fold. 

I'm happy with my simple map art.  Definitely has some sentimental value!

I'm almost done tweaking my office, so more pictures of that soon!  Anyone else doing anything "pinteresting" lately?