Okay, who started plenty of wedding projects out of pure excitement as soon as they got engaged not evening knowing anything about your wedding and it could end up being a big waste of time? *raised hand*

Enter my dying need to have a fun homemade map. I’ve swooned over tons of drawn out maps by the pros like Laura Hooper…

Not something that was at ALL in our budget or that I felt needed to be in the budget but thought I would take a stab at still making a fun one on my own. Keep in mind I’m the least tech savvy person here pretty much and can only use the basics… so if you know how to use some PowerPoint I’m here to help you out!

Unfortunately I did this before I ever knew I was going to make my way into the blogger world or I would have done a tutorial. Instead I will try and explain it clearly and if you have any questions be sure to comment and I can help you out!

1. Go into Google Maps or Mapquest (or your own friendly map provider).

2. Find your wedding location and zoom into it to have everything you would need for your wedding in the screen shot.

3. Take a screen shot of the map and you can crop it to your liking if you’d like in Paint or whatever.

4. Open PowerPoint, paste your map onto a slide.

5. Using lines, shapes, text boxes, etc. start tracing the map using different techniques… you screw up just delete it and try again.

6. One you’ve traced all of the usefull roads, labeled important streets, etc. of the map click on the original map and press delete.

7. You should have a fabulous little drawn out map. I got a rectangle shape to put around the map and erase all of the other lines around the rectangle so that all of the lines could be wherever and not have to worry about it in the beginning.

8. Find clip art in PowerPoint or online to use for significant places. Like a church, or as you will see on my map I found a little yacht.

9. Save the slide as an image and you have yourself a map ready for printing! Make sure the resolution works because I had to tweat it a bit so it wasn’t blurry in certain sizes.

10. Be patient, it was all trial and error for me and probably took me a good 1.5 hours or so, I really don’t remember.

That is what I ended up with, not Laura Hooper or anything but I got it in the colors I wanted and thought it was pretty cute rather then just having a boring map. I will say this though — I didn’t even use it in my invites, ended up just having step by step directions. I still thought I did a great job and will maybe make it for our rehearsal dinner or something!