meish dot org: life, unfolding

I needed a new table in my study for crafty projects (sewing machine, somewhere to use cutting board, dedicated place for framing etc) but I quite fancied something a little bit different.

Coincidentally, our old road atlas was falling apart (and out of date), and I cannot bear to throw away a map, even one as pedestrian as that, so I thought I could combine the two creatively….

So yesterday while the football was on I nipped to Ikea and bought a plain boring 100X60 tabletop, and today I took advantage of the sunshine today and decamped to the back garden with a few bits and pieces and got to work.

And in case anyone wanted to do the same, here’s what I did and what I learnt.

I cut about 20 shapes out of the map, each nearly a page in size. I cut along the lines of roads, motorways, rivers, coastlines and county borders, so that the overlaps would seem less obvious.

I chose places which are familiar to me from family, holidays or former homes.

I used repositionable spraymount to stick the pieces to the tabletop. If I was doing this again, I’d probably use something else. It was good to be able to reposition the chunks, but the glue went everywhere and was nearly impossible to get off my hands later, plus it didn’t stick terribly well – though that might have been a side-effect of failing to spray the edges.

I laid the pieces out to overlap, and kept the grid on the map intact as much as possible, so even though I was inventing whole new landscapes and regions, there would at least be some flow through it in the form of thin blue lines.

After the whole thing was laid out, there were a few gaps, so I cut out chunks of blue and tucked them underneath the other bits. New lakes! I used Copydex to stick down the edges which were all a bit flyaway.

Then I gave the whole thing a layer of clear varnish, followed by another one an hour later and still another later on.

The varnish dried well, but it didn’t quite work as I was expecting – I was hoping it would be heavy enough to weigh down the paper and provide a sort of clear layer on top. The spray varnish I was using was much more lightweight, which meant it caused some of the paper to curl and bubble up.

Hmm.

So I had a rummage in my study and found some sticky-back plastic, which I then smoothed over the whole thing.

This worked much better, but unfortunately the bubbling caused by the earlier varnish is still vaguely perceptable. That’s ok – I’ll just stick the sewing machine on top and no-one will ever notice.

And that was it. Total cost, including buying the varnish, spraymount and table = £15. (I already had the copydex, map and sticky-back plastic (how very Lesley Judd of me, I know))

There’s a full set of photos here.

Now I’ve just got to figure out what to do with the rest of the atlas…