No place like home.

I'm baaack!  Okay fine, I've been home since Sunday, no, technically Monday because I didn't arrive back to House on Hubbard until 12:15am.  It was a long weekend in DC with 11-hour board meeting days.  To top it off, I was busy on Monday and Tuesday nights, too.

In addition to missing Louis while I was away, I definitely missed our home, too.  When I flew out over the Twin Cities last Thursday, my plane went right over our house!  I've never had that happen in my thousands of miles of flying and handful of places I've lived.  We were too high in the sky for me to pinpoint our house, but I tracked down a few visible boundaries that led me to know I was over our neighborhood.

Anyway, it's time to get back to my crafting roots.  I harnessed some extra energy tonight to work on a project that allowed me to sit on the couch. :)  I've wanted to create some hometown art for quite a while, especially after seeing some examples on other blogs (both of which I've had bookmarked for quite a while now!).  First, there was Young House Love's vintage bathroom sign and then there was Bower Power's States of the Union.

Now, I'm an Iowa girl and Louis is a Minnesota boy (but he did live in Iowa for four years, too!).  To pay a little homage to both of our states I took the general idea of these other bloggers, more a nod to the second and thought up places, mottos, etc. that reminded us of our states (Louis helped!).  And because there is something about the outlines of the states that I love, I took it one step further and simply copied a map outline and added my little word text boxes inside.  I conjured up my old background in layout design (editor/staff on three yearbooks and HS newspaper--no big deal).  I wish I had a fancy Adobe program, but I'll settle for Microsoft Publisher any day.

Not much by way of tutorial here.  I simply created many text boxes, typed in something new, and changed the font each time.  I use Publisher for this type of thing because I like being able to easily manipulate and move the boxes to exactly where I click them to go.

This is phase one.  I'll need to print these up and frame them.  I'm thinking they would be good art in our bedroom since we have nothing on the walls right now, but maybe I want these in a place where someone besides the two of us can enjoy?

And without further ado, here are my homemade, hometown works of art!

Oh, Iowa, I will always love you.

And Minnesota, my new home for the past four years.

But for now, after spending MUCH of my work day in Publisher pretending I know anything about creating ads and now this project, it's time to call it a day.  One more day of work and then I've convinced Louis to take a day off with me; three-day weekend, you are SO close!