a word on crafting & political borders

While I am trying my damnedest to fool others into thinking I possess some level of domestic skilliness (the Betty Factor) I am also trying to rock the Martha Factor too.  Since I am weak and submit to peer pressure with ease I have a Pinterest account and it makes me feel productive even though I have not really had anything to show for it yet.  I find myself seeing other people's pins and thinking "oooo that's some cool shit!" but then I notice that they pinned it via ME ... and I wonder if I can't remember the cool shit, I don't make the cool shit, then what is the point of this shit?  Alas, I have no answer, but Pinterest is like crack for this stay at home mother Martha/Betty wannabe.

Doing good until we hit Cali

Anyhoo, I have seen a bunch of pins like this and that one that have some kind of cute map art.  Being that I have the shortest hallway known to man and want to do something cool with it I decided that this would need to be something I actually did from Pinterest.  Yay me.  The husband is from Iowa, I am from Arizona and we got married in Hawaii so I had three states and I also happened to have 3 Ikea frames that needed usin'.  Feeling pretty thrifty, crafty, and thinking I was hot shit, I got started.

I went to this website and got blank outlines of each state because my OCDness was really freaked out by how I had to cut off names and stuff on the labeled maps on things near the border.  Hell, by the time I finished Hawaii would have been "Haw" and had no cities to speak of.  I took the blank outlines and flipped them over in Photoshop so I could cut along the lines and have solid white states at the end.  

Damn volcanic islands!

Thinking I was pretty rockstar still at this point I busted out my scissors and went to cut out Arizona on the cardstock first ... it was then I discovered my theoretical love for political boundaries.  You see, Arizona was cut up like a pizza, then the Colorado River screwed things up.  Lots of careful cutting later I had my 4 inch tall Arizona and an aversion to natural borders.  

Then I looked at Iowa.  

Then I looked at Hawaii.  

Well crap.

I figured drinking at 9 in the morning while using scissors and being responsible for the baby was a bad-mommy-idea, so I did it sober with lots of swearing.  

Long story short, I managed to get them cut out, didn't loose any islands (a monumental accomplishment, I assure you) and then spent like 30 minutes agonizing over what paper to glue them too.  I never said I was any good at this stuff, just that I want to try.

Here is the end result.  I added pics of my kiddos as newborns and one of the hubs and me to make it not be a wall of boring maps.