Atlas Map Frames

My dad’s one of those guys who is really hard to come up with presents for. He loves travelling and family photos though, so one of the gifts I made him for Christmas this year was a couple of map frames.

All I needed was a couple of pictures, wide frames (I used 4×6 plain wood frames from Ikea), Mod Podge, and some maps. I’ve seen a ton of map projects I love on pinterest, so I’ve been looking for maps at garage sales and thrift stores for a while now, but haven’t found anything decent. At my local Half Price Books, though, they had about 10 copies of Goode’s Atlas, which is full of 200+ pages of colorful maps of everywhere for only $5.

I picked out maps from the same locations as the pictures I’d chosen(Australia/New Zealand and Southern Africa), and cut them into strips wide enough to wrap around each side of the frame. I only needed one page of map for each 4×6 frame. I then coated the frame with a thin layer of Mod Podge using a foam brush and pressed on the map pages. For each paper strip, I started with the front face of the frame and then wrapped it around to the back on the top and bottom making sure I had nice creased edges and smoothing out any bubbles or wrinkles as I went.

Once the entire frame was covered, I went over the maps again with another layer of Mod Podge to seal everything. This gave the frames a nice finish and will keep any overlapping edges from peeling up or tearing.

The picture on the left is from something called ‘zorbing’ that we did in Australia – where you basically get in a giant blow-up ball and roll down a hill, which was awesome! (link here) The other one is from a cool place in South Africa where a guy raises and trains elephants and we got to play with them.

I obviously used maps to cover these frames, but this technique could be applied with any paper-type substance – scrapbook paper, book pages, and sheet music would all look awesome too!