Map Clothespins

I was trying to think of a way to display some postcards the other day when I remembered about some old wire office trays I acquired from my grandparent's house. I heart old metal, ahhh. Anyway, I figured I could clip them on with some good ol' clothespins, but honestly I'm not a fan of the light wood look, so cue the trumpets and welcome the stain!

It's *so* much easier if you just dip each half in the stain rather than applying it with a cloth. I know, I know, sounds pretty obvious, but I generally do things the hard way and don't think of the easy way until *after* I finish a project!

So once the stain was nice and dry, I looked at my little clothespins and knew they needed more. Cue the trumpets and now welcome a map of the Sacramento area! Hey, I need something to remind me of California when I move to New Jersey =) I made sure to include some areas that have significance to me, like the city I currently live in and even my street.

My favorite method of sticking things together is using spray adhesive. I have used it on many design projects in school and it really holds things together...I mean *really*! As in you don't want to spray it anywhere except the items you want to stick together.

After spraying the spray adhesive on the map I held the map up to the light with the side I wanted showing facing down toward me, then I put the clothespin on top of the map where the spray adhesive was. That helped me to get the words placed exactly where I wanted them to be. After letting them dry, I tried 2 different method of cutting the excess map: tearing and cutting with scissors.

I ended cutting all of them to get a nice clean look and then I went over the edges with sandpaper and this is what I ended up with.

But of course I couldn't leave them looking so clean, so I decided to expirement with using wood stain over the maps. I learned a very valuable lesson when doing this. I figured it would work just like wood where you apply the stain, wait a minute, then wipe it off, but it doesn't work quite that way with paper ::blush::

You can tell by the above picture that I gradually learned that less is more. It's best to get stain on your rag, then wipe most of it off, then lightly apply the stain to your paper.  I think I'll probably make a few more to get the lighter look since you can barely see the map on the dark clothespins.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results and I know they will bring me good memories and make me smile on those cold New Jersey days.