A big project deserves a big post

My parents both turned 60 last year. My sister and I decided that, to celebrate, we would both come for a visit (with my boyfriend and her husband in tow) and cook them dinner. That sounds a little boring, but this wasn't just any dinner! We created custom menus for each of them - a "for him" and "for her" menu based on their favorite foods. It was pretty work intensive, took a lot of planning, and was a lot of fun. The two of us (three if you count my little nephew that was, at the time, in her belly!) and our men went shopping and made the whole meal, and it all came out great.

That was the easy part.

Since we did the dinner closer to my dad's birthday in January, we also gave my dad his present at the dinner. My sister and I both like doing DIYs, so we decided it would be great to make something together for him. My dad is kind of hard to get gifts for because he knows what he wants, and he goes out and gets them himself! Not to mention that the things he likes are generally out of my price range, since it's usually whatever the newest technology is.

Well, we decided that since he loves his technology, and since he also travels very often, we would make him something that would incorporate both those things. After much Pinterest searching and emails between the two of us, my sister and I decided that we would make him a binder where he could cleanly store all of his cords and techie items when he travels, to avoid things getting tangled and keep everything in one place. A tutorial on how to make the book can be found here.

My sister, as I've mentioned, has the sewing ability between the two of us. Not to mention a sewing machine. So she took on the task of creating the actual book. As it turned out, this was much more difficult than anticipated, and I'm glad it was her, not me!

We of course wanted to personalize the gift, and that's where I came in. We decided that I would do a paper cut, or two or three, to cover the front, back and spine of the book. Since it was for travel, I decided to do a map of the world for the cover, names of cities my dad has been to for the back, and then treat the spine like it was a real title of a book. Once I finished the 3 cuts, I sent them off to my sister who mod-podged them onto the outside of the book.

All went fine except for that stinking map. See, when I make a papercut, I draw out the design in pencil and then cut around it. When I'm done cutting there are often pencil marks left over that need to be erased. However, you have to be so careful when erasing because, once cut, the paper can be very delicate. That was the case with a map, and on the first papercut I ended up ruining it when I tried to erase the pencil lines. So another technique if you don't want pencil is to just flip it over and the back becomes the front. Well that of course means that whatever you draw will get reversed, and that doesn't work out too well when you're doing something like words or a map. I also don't own a light box (my next purchase!), and so there I was, free-handing a map of the world, backwards. It took a LOT of fine-tuning to get it to actually look like the world, but I have to say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Pictures of the finished product in all its glory and angles below.

That darned map:

The back of the book:

The inside - you can really see my sister's amazing handiwork here!

The whole outside, including the spine: