First anniversary Idea

Hubby and I are going to celebrate our first year of marriage in a couple weeks! He is very traditional and wanted to give gifts made of paper for our first year together. We will be on our cruise to the Bahamas when we exchange gifts so I wasn’t sure what I should get him that I can get on the ship and in our luggage. I thought about tickets to a play or show, but we had been looking at them together so that ruined the surprise. I then came across this great idea at http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/1st-anniversary-diy-map-gift-tutorial#axzz2RrDFqGHE
 

I had seen the framing of maps before, but I never thought of writing on the frames or cutting them into different shapes! I went to Michael’s and found a set of 4 square picture frames for about $14. Then I just googled our special locations and printed them off on a color printer. Finally, I searched for different clip art shapes that I liked and printed them off. The hard part was making sure they were all the same size. I just used windows paint to resize the images and did a lot of guessing. Although, once I got the frames I realized they were exactly the right size! I only had to get some colored paper for backing and I was good to go!

Here’s the clip art images I used and resized.

My trick for cutting the shapes out of the maps was pretty simple. I stacked the clipart on top of the map and traced it with a pen with lots of pressure. This caused the map to be indented and if I then flipped the map over to the white side I could easily see the indention and knew exactly where to cut!

I put my maps with backing in my frames and then wrote on the border. My ideas were:

·         “One boy. One girl.” (stick people) – maps of where we were born

·         “Fell in love” (heart) – map of our college where we met and began dating

·         “Got married” (champagne glasses) – map of our wedding location

·         “Started a home together” (house) – map of the first house that we bought together



I also thought of doing a map of our honeymoon in hawaii, but I'm not sure which clipart I could use. Another option for the wedding map could be wedding bells or two rings entertwined, but I thought the glasses were cuter and were a better and clearer shape.

Unfortunately I already wrapped up the gift and its sitting in a closet so I can’t post a final picture right now. I’ll update in a couple weeks after he opens it! I know he will love it since he’s so sentimental about things like that! I plan on hanging the four frames on each side of our wedding collage. I also picked separate frames so I can always add more monumental moments, like when we have our first child!

Update: the final product!