Weddingbee Blog

I knew I wanted a hand-drawn map, and I knew I didn’t want to pay someone else to draw it. I thought I’d be able to trace a Google map and draw cute things for landmarks easy peasy, scan it in to the computer and print them out. I waited to tackle this fun project until Weekend-invite-assembly-mayhem-must-go-out-by-Tuesday Crunch Time.

That’s not a great plan, hive. I’m a procrastinator. And seeing my old habits collide with my bridal-driven desire for perfection, my one surviving logical brain cell nearly nixed the map project to spare myself frustration and tears.

Here’s where my knight in thimbley armor saved the day!

Mr. T took a look at the Wedding Mapper tutorial I was trying to follow to no avail, and he riffed it by tracing the map in Photoshop and deleting the layer underneath the resulting lines. Does that sound right, Photoshoppers? Sorry, bad blogger doesn’t want to bug her future hubs for the play-by-play, but the result was this chivalrous gift of blue line design:

I’m not great with technology, but I am good with directions. So I went to work labeling these lines (in blue marker… hence the blue lines in the first place). I added some flair, and we had a rough draft:

Once I worked out the kinks and had a semi-flawless (by procrasti-standards) version, we scanned our hybrid-hand-drawn kinda map into Photoshop, grabbed the necessary blue bits with the magic wand and got rid of the paper-colored background. We kicked it into grayscale gear, and we were on the road to this semi-hand-crafted-looking invite insert:

We printed them double-sided with the directions on the back…

And we printed some of them on 5×7 cover from Paper Presentation. The color mostly matched, but the weight was significantly less than the letterpress invite making for floppier paper. The know-it-all in me sought perfection, however, so I had purchased some 110 Crane Lettera in the same color as my invitations while I was at the paper store, thinking this would go through my shiny new Epson Artisan printer. I was mistaken, but we were determined, so we got the paper to feed through a laser printer—which took all afternoon.

So, we had 50% floppy neat-printed maps, and 50% slightly smudgey from toner luxe paper maps, and a bride ready to be done with this project. This was a recipe for oversight, which yielded smudged maps on the back of gorgeous invitations because I didn’t think to separate the toner-printed pieces with tissue until I’d been stuffing invitations for 8 days and decided not to care (yes, I missed my deadline):

Whoops.

Moral of the story: Ask for help, compromise, and if a project you’re working on looks way better on slightly less quality paper, eat the cost of the luxe paper and use the better looking, non-smudging version. Le sigh…

Anyway, this wasn’t about the silly mistake I made, it’s about DIYing a semi-hand-drawn map. And it can be done in one weekend warrior day! You can even line your envelopes while they slowly print…

Did you include a map or DIY any invitation pieces?