For the love of maps

I LOVE maps. I mean LOVE them. I love to stare at them, work out where i am, how to get to another place, remember it all and give it a go in real life. Then i like to stare at old maps and think how unbelievable it is that people were able to get it so wrong and yet so right at times with regards to where places are.

My love for maps means that I am one of those who still loves to check out the London A-Z before i need to go somewhere new. I dont really like google maps, it just feels wrong relying on a little dot to tell me im going in the right direction.

Why am i telling you this?

Well, last weekend i was in heaven pouring over my new london cycling guide maps i got in the post, check them out....amazing!You can order the free guides here. Adam had to forcefully remove them from my hands so that i would actually leave the flat and do something with my weekend but he also came up with a clever solution to indulge in my map love.

The answer? Maps Coasters.

Now, these are no new idea. In fact im sure there's a million of them floating around etsy and everywhere else but Adam has no idea of that world so we decided to do it ourselves with some trial and error.

How did we do it?
We headed to lewisham hoping that the charity shops would have some old maps. They didn't. Then i thought we should chance having a look in the pound shops, you never know what they have. Well lucky us. We got a 2012 version of the Collins British road map, along with four coasters and some book covering in the 99p store....that 1 penny means everything!

For some reason, this map includes Ireland in it.....not part of Britain but I was happy because it meant i got to include my lovely hometown as one of the coasters.

 We cut out sections of the map to size. Before we could stick the cutouts on to the coasters we peeled the thin film of plastic off the top of the coasters.
We then stuck the map cutouts on with PVA glue...lots of it. I think each coaster took 3-4 coats of the glue.
I was hoping that the glue would be enough to seal them but it wasn't so we stuck some clear book covering on top and it seems to have worked a treat.

Adam has decided though that if we make them again, or if you guys would like to try it out, sticking the book covering onto the map cutouts first and then sticking the whole map cover onto the coaster would work better. Why? As the maps were quite then paper the glue soaked right through and made them wrinkle up a little bit when drying.
Overall thought I'm pretty happy with them, for £1.98 we have four new coasters that our more our style than the originals!

Am I th only one who loves maps? Chloe x