Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Family Tree

This is a project that my sister and I did over the summer, and unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the finished product because, well, oversight.

The project was creating a family tree, and not just one of those where you have paper and a tree and you fill in names. We wanted it to look fancy and be wall-hangable. My mom & sister had spent a lot of time researching and figuring out the family history, all the way back to Constable Andrew Everest, who came to Maine from England in the 1640s. So for my mom's birthday (in June), we decided to make the family tree.

We went through a lot of thought about what kind of materials to use that wouldn't make it look like some homegrown craft project. We eventually settled on using a foamboard as the base, covering it with some brown fabric, and printing out each individual's name on thick brown scrapbook paper and mounting that on one of 3 different types of scrapbook paper, depending on what generation the individual belonged to. The lines connecting the names would be made out of round silver cord for the horizontal lines and smaller silver cord for the vertical ones. Here's what it ended up looking like:

The names set out (and hot glued on) before the lines connecting the various family relationships were added. The 3 different types of scrapbook paper depicting the different generations can be seen here (matte brown paper, brown paper with raised decoration, and red paper with velvet). 

In the midst of adding the silver cord. The thicker cord stretched across each generation of kids, and the thinner cord connected the parent pair and each kid to the thick cord.

This is the last picture I took of the project still in progress. I promise it did get finished... I guess I'll have to take a picture the next time I go to Dallas. I have to say that it turned out WAY better than I was anticipating. It actually didn't look like some craft project, and will look pretty snazzy when it eventually gets framed. Plus my mom loved it :)

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