There are several ways to customise stainless steel world maps. Often, neodymium or ferrite magnets, also known as fridge magnets, are used to give the map a personal touch. But in today's post, we'll focus on a more personal approach, one with customised photos in the leading role.
As we mentioned before, metal world maps come in various sizes. Some are even as big as 4 meters (13 ft.) wide. But these giant world maps are not suitable for smaller spaces. Most people only have room to house regular-sized maps with a width of a little over 2 meters (6.5 ft.). You can imagine that a map of this width is too small to house regular-sized Polaroid pictures. Even the nowadays often-used mini Polaroids are too big and cover several countries instead of just one. For that reason, we thought it would be better to make the Polaroid pictures ourselves. By selecting some of your favourite travel pictures and exporting them into a program for editing, you can simply create your own. Just resize the photos and make sure you have enough whitespace to create that typical Polaroid look, and you'll end up with a sheet full of small pics like those displayed below.
After you have printed the Polaroid pictures on a glossy sheet of paper, it's time to cut them into the actual Polaroid format. When doing so, make sure you end up with some more white space at the bottom of the picture. Because this can be useful to add some text to the Polaroid. Also, by cutting the other sides a little bit closer to the image itself, you'll end up with that perfect Polaroid layout. When this is done, you can add some text on the bigger white space at the bottom, or leave it empty if you prefer. If you want to add some text to the picture, something like the place where you made the picture or perhaps the date on which the picture was taken, you might want to use a label-maker for the text instead of just writing with a marker. That is if you have used glossy paper for printing the Polaroids and you have a label-maker, of course.
Last but not least, sticking the Polaroids to your stainless steel world map. Because all metal world maps from MapaWall are magnetic, you can easily stick your brand new mini-Polaroids to the surface of your map. With the small neodymium pin-magnets, you can secure all the magic moments of your trip to the surface of the map without damaging the world map itself. To give you an impression of what a regular-sized magnetic stainless steel world map would look like, we pinned our South America travel with these DIY Polaroids.
If you've done something similar or created something else worth sharing, feel free to send us your map and let us share it with the world.
