Prior to giving birth, my sister talked about wanting to take milestone picture of her new little one (one day old, one week, two weeks, etc.). I told her I would help her make some sort of prop to write on, or even cut out the weeks/months, but she lives in another state and we were never able to coordinate our time to tackle this project. Along comes Miss Maya and, OOPS! we have nothing done. So, in an attempt to salvage her idea, my sister tries to hurry and pull something together so that she can at least start it at two weeks. A couple Saturdays ago she was down for the weekend and we took a trip to Michael's to gather materials. I was surprised that they didn't have any chalkboards to decorate, be we ended up with a large, unfinished wooden frame that could hold an 8"x10' picture and wooden letters so that we spell out the baby's name. From there, we had no clue what it would actually look like. Apparently, my sister either trusted me, or she had no interest in the construction of it, or she just didn't have the time, but she told me to take the new purchases home and she would pick it up on Monday. No pressure.
Saturday came and went, and Sunday found me still not sure what to do with the blank canvas that sat infront of me. Think, think, think... My first thought was to find a background I could cut out on the Silhouette Cameo and use it as a stencil on the frame. I definitely found some backgrounds that I liked, but while I was looking, it hit me, a BANNER! I had previously purchased a set of six banners by Miss Kate Cuttables from the Silhouette Online Store. One of the banners contained three different shapes that I thought would look cute on the frame.
I cut out the banner and then decided to take it a step further; I pulled several brightly colored, coordinating fabrics and cut out two shapes per fabric. I then connected each individual pennant to a strip of pink pompon ribbon.
There! Hard part done.
Now for the more labor-intensive steps, painting the frame and letters. I ended up putting three coats of white on the frame and three coats on the letters.
Confession time: I thought I had an M, but it turned out I was using an upside down W. I couldn't figure out why it just didn't look right until my husband took a look at it and said, "You know your using a W, right?" Oh, yeah, of course I did...
I swapped out the W for the M, but for some reason the M was smaller than the other letters. When I put each one next to each other it looked cute, but a little off. Since I knew that my sister really liked these letters I had a Tim Gunn "make it work" moment. I somewhat remedied the problem by stretching out the letters over the length of the frame. Since the letters weren't on top of each other, the size difference was not as obvious.
For final touches, I added a pink clay ribbon to each end of the ribbon and one in the middle. This helped to finish off the rough ends and made it look a little more polished. I then popped in a piece of black "All Chalked Up" chalkboard paper from DCWV. I do have chalkboard paint, but I love the DCWV paper because it is smooth and doesn't have brush strokes, which are a given if I would have used the chalkboard paint. My sister was a little skeptical about using "paper," but I told her to buy bistro markers and she said it is working perfectly for her. Yea!
I am enthusiastically, emphatically, overjoyed with how this chalkboard turned out, mostly because I was winging it the whole time! I pulled this one out of...nowhere!
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