My Husband's "World"

As I mentioned in my last blog post, my husband celebrated a birthday this past weekend (which happened to be a pretty big one....the Big 40!). So now I can finally share the really cool gift I made for him. I've had this idea in my head for years and finally made it happen for this birthday .

To make this I started with an old globe 

(just something I had in all my clutter).

I covered it with gesso.

After the gesso dried, I should have sanded it lightly 

(but I can get ahead of myself when I'm excited)

I then collected a ton of pictures to print. 

I printed the photos on regular gift wrapping tissue paper.

Now you might be wondering how I printed on tissue paper. It took some trial and error, which included yanking wads of tissue paper out of my printer. But here's what finally worked on a fairly consistent basis with very few tissue paper jams. I cut the tissue paper to 8.5" x 11" and then taped it to a regular 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper using scotch tape. I taped the top and bottom edge along the full length of the edge. This is very important for the front edge going into the printer.

See the tape along the top edge. Wish I could have gone a better photo.

This allowed me to feed the paper into my inkjet printer. I then cut out my pictures and carefully adhered them to the globe using Mod Podge (I didn't get any pictures of this--got ahead of myself again). Be cautious because too much Mod Podge can rip the photos.

It was quite the labor of love, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. And Daniel loved it! He was really blown away seeing his life represented like that. The globe was a great success! 

I'd actually love the chance to do another globe, but in a mixed media style. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for another globe.