How About We date at Woodcut Maps: Crafty McGrafty!

The little heart in the upper right is Flagstaff Hill, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA. It's where Matt proposed!

Once again, How About We helped us put together a great date. (I've talked about How About We before; check out my love letter to them here.) Today, we spent a couple hours at Woodcut Maps, a great husband-and-wife business in San Francisco (in the Mission).

Catherine and her husband started their business a year or two ago as an online business. (You should check it out -- you can design a wood map of a place of your choosing, and you're supporting a local home-based business! They've got wall art as well as phone cases.)

Our workshop (at this time only available through How About We) was run out of the owners' home in the Mission district of San Francisco. As you might imagine, it was a little bit above and beyond just ordering from the website -- we chose a meaningful spot, they laser-cut the wood ahead of time, and we laid, sanded and cured the wood over a couple hours.

Here are the steps we took to create our personalized map:

Step 1: We placed pre-cut wood in appropriate spots and then taped them together. 

Step 2: We taped the wood pieces together entirely, then flipped them over and sanded so that the pieces were flush.

Step 3: We glued the thin jigsaw puzzle-y bits to a larger block.

Step 4: Catherine gathered up all our blocks, put them in a vacuum, then sent us off to lunch.

Matt and I went to Southern Pacific Brewing and Humphry Slocombe during our 2 hour break: 

I mean, isn't he cute? The "I Heart ME" shirt, the grin. He's the bomb dot com.

We got the Secret Breakfast & the Elvis (The Fat Years).

By the time we got back, the glue was all dry, which meant we could move on:

Step 5: After removing all the tape, we ironed on siding with heat-activated glue to the sides of our blocks, then cut off the excess.

Step 6: Then we got all crazy with a hand sander and sanded it all down to look awesome.

Step 7: Finally, we added some finish to make it look all profesh and whatnot.

While the finish dried, we sat around drinking white wine in Catherine's backyard, and in about 20 minutes, we were packing out stuff up in brown paper to take home!

It was a great way to spend a Saturday with my dude, and we got some cool home-made art out of it to boot. What more can a girl ask for?