Europe Travel Wall Map...Rev 2
Arts and crafts time again. I'm covering my Europe Travel Wall Map for the second time because I'm about to have to paint over it....again, and then recreate it.....again. More on that in a second. The reason I did this the first time was to encourage us to travel. Branelle and I both enjoy seeing the world but it's really easy to come up with reasons not to go places. We have a few artsy things in our house that kind of make you think about going places. It works, at least for us.
I had done this in our previous home and blogged about it. Here's the link:
https://srod23.blogspot.com/2014/09/europe-travel-wall-project.html
When we sold our home a few years ago it was recommended that I paint over it. While I couldn't imagine why anybody wouldn't want a partially painted map of Europe on their kitchen wall, I had to defer to our real estate agent and reluctantly covered it. I also swore I wasn't going to redo it in our new home because it was way too much work.
My wife had other ideas and decided that I should definitely do it and it should go on this curved wall in our kitchen eating area. I resisted for a while but eventually relented after another trip to Europe and got started.
The first step was to pull out the old overhead projector (which I bought for the first one) and get a map traced up on the wall. There were a few issues this time, the biggest being that the wall was curved. I didn't do a very good job if I'm being honest of adjusting for the curvature. Basically, if you looked at the countries to the west, like Spain, and the countries to the east, like Turkey, they ended up being larger than they should be.
Arts and crafts projects are typically nighttime endeavors for me. When everyone else goes to bed the house is quiet and peaceful and I kind of appreciate the simplicity of working on something that requires little or no thought. I did run into one issue while tracing the map - the chandelier was creating a line-of-sight issue with some of the Scandinavian countries. With nobody awake to hold it back I was forced to improvise with a lightsaber and some ergonomically unsafe leaning.
Once I got the map traced the hard part began. I paint all of the flags freehand. It wouldn't be that hard, except that the paint that I used just doesn't cover very well. It takes me three or four coats with some of the colors to get it right. It's tedious, but again kind of relaxing at night.
Our daughter has actually learned a lot of the countries by using a laser pointer on the map at dinner. We're going to take her to Europe this coming year so she's very excited about the trip and hitting a bunch of the countries she knows....and getting stamps in her passport! She's especially enamoured with Iceland for some reason so we'll probably have to stop over on the way to or from the continent.
Sadly, I'm going to have to redo the map yet again. This time it's kind of my own fault. I discovered that there was a cavity of space behind our fireplace and under the stairs. I decided to bust out the wall from the garage and sure enough, there's a pretty good spot in there so we're going to build a walk in wine grotto but the entrance has to be on this wall (what you're looking at here is the back side of the wall that the map is on as taken from the future wine grotto after I busted in from the garage). I wasn't going to do this map wall again, but now that my daughter is interested I guess I'll have to get it up one last time. We're thinking the dining room this time. We'll see.
