A State of Mind Project

My friend, Lori, lives in the UK - we were friends before she moved there, we were friends while we all lived there and we're still friends these many years later.

So when I saw that she'd pinned this on Pinterest:

Source

I knew I'd have to make one and send it to her.

I bought a painted wooden plaque, finish nails and two colors of tatting thread. I also found a good map of Ohio (her home state) and sized it to fit before printing it out.

The process is pretty simple - tape the map with painter's tape to your work surface.

Then hammer the nails along the outline of the map.

I kept the nails reasonably close to one another.

For my centerpoint, I found a sticker heart in my scrapbooking supplies.

Once I hammered around everything, I carefully pulled up the map. Apparently, not carefully enough...some nails came up with the map. No biggie - just hammer them in again.

Voila: Ready to string it up.

I tied my thread to the nail where I planned to start and stop.

Then it was a ton of looping in and out from the outside nails to the centerpoint nails. I actually looped twice for each nail to make it stand out nicely.

I used my red thread to wrap around the inside and outside of the border and centerpoint to make them stand out more.

Doesn't this look great?!?!

This was a super-fun and easy project to do. All in all, it took about 2 hours. But with all of my starts and stops, it took about 3 weeks.

About the same amount of time that it took to have it shipped to her.

Now to make one for Kansas and one for Texas and...

(We love you Lori!!!!)