NC Girl in Paradise: Total Eclipse of the Heart

I wanted to share the anniversary present that I made for my husband. Since we are renovating our office and some time soon want to add a roof to our outdoor patio, we decided to keep things simple this year (plus I had already planned our January date for our anniversary).

So, I went to my go to source when I want a great idea - pinterest! And, I came across this great picture and idea. Click here for a full description.

I got a couple maps from AAA and I was going to just look online and print the rest. Originally I was going to do hearts just like in the tutorial, but my friend, Shawna, had an awesome idea. She suggested doing a different shape for each picture. I had already decided upon the following "stages" of our relationship to do a map/picture for:

1. One boy (Hawaii for Jeff), one girl (Raleigh for me)
2. Met in a hospital (New York City), I wanted to get a subway map
3. Traveled (2 awesome trips before we were married - Argentina and Morocco)
4. Got Married (Waikiki)
5. Bought a house (blueprints for our house)
6. Had kids - ?Hawaii again?

Instead of doing a heart for each one, I decided to do a hospital symbol for the NYC one, an airplane for the traveling one, and house for the house, etc. I also had to narrow down the maps - I opted to do just Argentina instead of doing half Argentina-half Morocco for the map because Jeff got really bad food poisoning on our trip to Morocco and sometimes that brings up bad memories. And, for the kids one, I found some cute clip art of babies in a similar style as the man/woman icons and I found a map online of Queen's Medical Center where I delivered both boys, so this way it was different than the wedding one.

I don't have a Cricket machine like the post mentioned, so I just printed out shapes on cardstock on my computer, cut them out and then traced them on to the map. I did keep the part that I had cut out and used that like the post said to move around the map to find the section that you want. The hardest part was getting the particular part of the map that I wanted to incorporate. Like, for the boy one, I really wanted Jeff's neighborhood of Kahala to be really evident and that was a bit hard to center. Finding a good, high resolution map of Argentina online was also tricky, but I found one that was from lonely planet guide book we used on our tirp.

And here's the final result.