Vintage map envelopes

Its been a busy week and its all about making fun stuff for my new etsy store: LizzieLuvs2Recycle. So here's the latest: envelopes made out of vintage atlas maps. It was a shot in the dark as far as a recycling project and it turned out much better than expected. Fun, easy and I really love the results.

I looked for an envelope template on-line but couldn't find one that I liked (they were all odd sizes for various greeting cards and I wanted a standard business envelope). So after sitting there stumped for a while I did the whole "headslap; duh" thing and grabbed an envelope from my desk, deconstructed it and used it to make a cardboard template. Luckily, I had an old atlas in the car that was crying out to be repurposed and...Voila!

After a crafty evening tracing and cutting out the envelopes, I had this growing stack. It was very satisfying picking the prettiest maps and arranging my template for maximum interest. They already look cool, don't they??

I had this annoying long floppy ruler made out of thin plastic that turned out to be the perfect tool to act as a guide for the folds. Side flaps first...

Then the bottom flap. Looking good!

Then the top. I can't wait to use one myself!

Of course once I started cutting up the atlas, I kinda had to cut the whole thing! So now I have lots of envelopes. I ordered some glue/gum online to gum the sides down and leave a wetable gum on the flap so that it can be sealed. Hopefully it gets here fast--I'm really anxious to finish these babies and get them uploaded for sale!

 The fronts are so pretty and colorful. I will likely use an address label to give a nice white area in the center.

I can't wait to make some more fun stuff out of maps. I just bought a bunch of old National Geographic maps from eBay for some even bigger maps.