Quite a project!

When I went to Women's Conference in April, someone quoted President Monson about being sure that each of your children has a picture of a temple in their room, so that it would become an ingrained part of their lives...it was this April's General Conference, and he was reminding us of Pres Kimball's advice by qouting: "“It would be a fine thing if…parents would have in every bedroom in their house a picture of the temple“It would be a fine thing if…parents would have in every bedroom in their house a picture of the temple..." (Find Pres. Monson's talk here.)

Oops, I'd forgotten the advice already - time to carry it out!  I decided to go home and check, since it had been a while, and make sure that each child had a temple picture easily visible. A couple sorta did, so I went to the distribution center and picked up a few more pictures, a variety of temples from around the area, and we put them up in each child's bedroom. Except Kimberly's. When I called her to see which temple she wanted a picture of, she wanted to wait. What she really wanted, she told me later, was to do a Personal Progress (PP) value project, making a collage of all the temples in the world. Oh really? Okay. Let's think on that for a while. And that's how the project was born.

We contacted the Church's Intellectual Property Office, and they told us that if you are using Church copyrighted materials for home use, you do not need to get permission first. (See more info on that here or here.)  Kimberly decided to do this project for the value "Knowledge,"  partly because she doesn't really like computers, and knew she'd need to be willing to learn how to do some things to make it work. We're also not "scrapbooky" kind of people, so the whole project was a stretch for us. I decided that since I would be donating a lot of time to the project too, that I'd use it as one of my smaller projects toward another PP value.



Screen shots of the process, from the
temple web page, to the collage making.



So we commenced downloading the pictures of all the temples that currently have pictures online. Did you know that some temples have several different ones? There were 17 temples that are "Announced" with no pictures, not even artist's renderings. The other 143 we selected from the available choices.

Then we took the pictures, and decided which she wanted bigger, and which smaller. She went with a large SLC picture for the center, medium pictures of all the Utah and island temples as well as the San Diego temple, since it's a favorite. The rest we used Picasa's photo editing program and collaged pictures together so that we wouldn't have to pay a mint for the photo processing. This process took the longest. Costco printed the pictures up for us.

We went to Home Depot and bought a 4'X4' piece of 1/8" plywood, and some cute molding (which a neighbor helped corner cut) and she glued them together and to the plywood as a frame. Then she painted the whole thing gold.

Finally it was ready for the pictures. We cut the photos apart and began organizing them on the board. It took a few hours, but we got them all on the board, trying to not cover part of any temple. (We almost made it, but some did have to flub a bit to get them all on the board.) Then she used rubber cement and glued them all in place - kinda scary for her, as she worryed that they'd end up not quite in the right places and that one would get left off. But it worked out just fine. (So far we've only found one duplicate!)

But what to cover them with to finish the process? I e-mailed my friend Darcee who has a strong scrapbook background, asking for her ideas. She recommended Mod Podge, a decoupage medium, and it worked beautifully.  Now it's done and hanging up by the claw hangers we put into the corners and center of the top.



Isn't it pretty?!

Kimberly was the moving force behind getting this project done. I  thought we'd take it nice and slowly, a bit here and a bit there, since I was also busy with my own school work and driving everybody everywhere, but she had a bee in her bonnet, and we got it done in less than a month! It took a lot of hours, but it was fun. It was the most expensive PP project we've ever done, (hopefully ever,) but she expects to keep this for many years, ("Forever, Mom!") and it is really neat.

Next project - to make a map of the collage so that you can tell which temple is which!