HEART SHAPED WORLD: Love-Laced Maps from Melissa Schwall

That we find great romance in maps is a given. We may deem them indispensable in the moment, but our attachment to old fashioned printed maps tends to linger long after the moment has passed—when the creased and stained travel maps we’ve crammed into our purses and pockets have morphed into our lives’ ephemera, reminders of where we come from, where we’ve been, and where we wish we had gone. Try getting all that from a Google map.

Designer Melissa Schwall gives map adoration a winsome, literal spin. Schwall, whose work can be found amongst the novel hand-crafted offerings at Uncommon Goods, has applied her romantic worldview to a collection of made-to-order collages designed for lovers, in which two halves of a heart, each carefully extracted from a specific area of a new or vintage paper map, are brought together to form a single fully-formed heart—creating a graphic illustratiom of the merging of two disparate worlds.  Personalized copy completes the art piece. which Schwall creates by hand, and delivers framed.

Schwall is amongst a range of artists, designers, and craftspeople featured on Uncommon Goods, a Brooklyn-based online marketplace for quirky, inventive home decor, fashion, and artworks, sourced directly from the original makers. Sustainability and social responsibility—in addition to the championing of a select group of creatives who ply their trade by hand—lies at the heart of the company ethos. Uncommon stuff.