Mod Podge Map – House to Home

The best part of owning a house is turning it into your home. It’s been almost a year since we bought ours and we’ve been working away on projects to make it feel like us. This weekend was another one spent at Home Depot where my husband got a few new toys…I mean tools. We added some cabinets in our bathrooms for extra storage, and by we I mean I got to use the drill twice while he did everything else.

While he was off building, measuring, leveling, and drilling things, I was in our kitchen on my second attempt at turning a map into canvas art.

I followed this post I found on Pinterest, and we all know there’s a 90% failure rate with those.

I got my map from Barnes and Noble. I didn’t find anything nearly as inexpensive as the blog said since the majority of the maps available were laminated (un-mod-podgeable, Yes that’s a word!) so I found one that had the colors I wanted and had a paper that would work, although, it has a waxy coating on it so it wasn’t as porous as I would have wanted.

Also, I wanted the three panel look but after spending roughly an hour at Hobby Lobby staring at the assortment of sizes (and my husband quickly losing patience) I decided that two largeish canvases would work best with the size of the map we got.

I got home, laid the map out with books on top to flatten it. The next day or so I placed the two canvases over the map and disaster struck! I’d be cutting down the center of Europe and Africa! Au revoir Paris! 

Husband said it wasn’t that big of a deal, but it was.

To me.

As a geography major my little map loving heart couldn’t handle it.

We went back to the store of death (HB) for round two. I brought pictures of the map with a ruler next to it to see what canvas sizes would work and where the cuts would be.

I wasn’t willing to compromise with cutting any country in half.

We bought one large canvas. (I should mention this was Husband’s first idea but I really, really loved the panel look. Lesson learned.)

So back to the project!

The blog post didn’t go into as much detail as I would have wanted so I improvised a bit. I painted the sides of the canvas and about one inch in on the front.

Then, the worst part.

The canvas was 24″x 48″. The map was 28″ by 50″.

Land was lost. Countries disappeared.

I’m sorry Antarctica.

You’ll be missed top half of Greenland. And Canada. And Russia. And some islands off the coast of Norway.

Forgive me.

Most people probably won’t notice, but you’ll always be in my heart four inches of sacrificed mapage. #always

So, once I got over the pain of cutting the map the paint on the canvas was dry!

I laid it out on the floor and started at the bottom right corner with the Mod Podge. I got that area lined up then poured the milky white liquid and started brushing, working on 1/4 of the canvas at a time until I ended on the opposite end.

Once it was secure, I poured more milkiness on the top and distributed across the top. (Really, very little finesse was used)

I let it dry for about 20 minutes then hung it right on up!

Easy peasy lemon squ– there’s bubbles.

So once I hung it up, Husband noticed a bubble..or two…had formed. I credit this to the waxy texture of the map and it not being porous. See I knew from the beginning it would be an issue. In the coming weeks, aka when I remember, I’m going to by adhesive spray and try to reapply the map to the canvas using that.

Wish me luck!