The Map - How To

Okay this project was super super simple and you will be thouroughly UN-impressed when you are done reading :)
I was debating for some time what I wanted to do above our bed. I was toying with the idea of more photos, but didn't want to spend any more on frames and frankly I was too lazy to paint anything. So, thanks so some pinterest inspiration photos, mostly via Restoration Hardware (above), I decided on the triptec-map idea.

1. I love using a series of 3 so I "upcycled" some canvas paintings I had done a few years ago that I was sick of looking at. It might sound crazy but I painted over them with some cream-colored latex wall paint we had in our pantry. Once that was dry, I searched online for an antique map that had the dimensions I needed. Real prints are ridiculously expensive and I wanted this to be as cheap as humanly possible, so I decided to just print my own.


2. So I did like I always do and just google-imaged "Vintage Map of Washington DC" and picked the one I liked the best that had the highest-resolution. Then, I just pasted it into microsoft paint (no really, I don't have photoshop anymore) and stretched the image a little to make it wider and fit the dimensions I needed. I just eye-balled it, but if you want to be super fancy and precise you could measure and then apply that ratio to the picture.


3. Then I opened up a word document, made the margins super small and basically 'selected' sections of the image and printed them from the word doc. I did the images in sections, four sheets of paper for each canvas. I gave myself a little buffer of overlapping to make sure they lined up. Once I had printed them all out, I just modge-podged them on the canvas so that the lines and pictures on the map lined up. I had to trim a lot off the bottom sheets of paper but it actually worked out well. The modge-podge made the ink run just a tad but it ended up adding to the whole antique effect.


4. Once that was dry, I decided it needed a little more tailoring so I just taped off the borders and painted them all black with some acrylic that I already had. And voila, a triptec vintage map of DC! It's definitely not perfect but it literally didn't cost anything and I was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. It spans almost our entire Queen-sized bed and is a nice focal point since we don't have a headboard.