Upcycled Corkboard: Chalkboard Edition

Hello there! I know its been a while but hey, what can I say? Being young and broke means there's not always time (or money) for the crafty part. Sometimes you come home from work and even desiring to do anything but watch Netflix while lying motionless is an uphill battle, amirite? So let's dive right in!

My aunt's 60th birthday is this Monday. (UPDATE: Just to let you know, I started this post in February. It's now August. I can't even excuse that one. Anyway...) Now, she's a spunky lady and has been taking her age very gracefully as long as I've known her. We've had a tough couple of years in this family... we lost our matriarch, my uncle (her husband), and there's been some family discord... without going into too much detail, I just decided it was time to try to bring some harmony back in with a surprise party! We've never done much in the way of surprises so it's uncharted territory. She doesn't have Facebook so it's been really easy to hide all the planning, haha.

Our theme is "Take Me Out to the Ballgame!", specifically the New York Mets (we have some Yankee fans in the family too) because she is certainly a die-hard fan. She would tell me about how her and her father would listen to the games growing up and we have many, many, MANY photos from great games at Shea and Citi Field back when we had season tickets. What can I say, orange and blue runs through our veins.

I decided to take on a few projects to make this party pop without shelling out tons of dough on Mets-branded party supplies -- not that you can find any around here! We're in the tri-state area but Yankees and Red Sox run the show in most retailers. To be a true Mets fan is to accept disapointment I suppose. :P One project was turning an thrift store corkboard Ms. E and I bought a long while back into a chalkboard scoreboard. We have a problem with corkboards and our desire to bring home even the weirdest, most tattered and this one was no different. It was water stained and a bit torn up on the front. We were going to recover it much like the command station one a while back but instead, it sat in the corner until I cooked up this idea and dug it out. Shall we get to it, then?

First step's first... I decided to take a risk and see if I couldn't just paint the back of this thing with chalkboard paint. Turns out, yes. It's got a bit of texture to it but its quite nice, very vintage feeling. If you'd like less texture, I suggest priming it first with a couple coats of flat paint but... honestly, too lazy. You're going to want to start this process early...

Nice, long strokes...

This particular brand suggests you give it 4 hours between coats and 3 DAYS of curing before you start to use it. So plan accordingly! Once you've let it cure, its time to start designing. So I'm doing a scoreboard, but this can easily be turned into a inspirational message board or just a very decorative chalkboard -- the sky is the limit! I needed to lay down some lines so with a ruler, a yard stick, and a paint pen, I went to it.

My board was 3' wide by 2' tall. I left 7 inches at the top for my header and the inning numbering then each team slot was 4.5 inches tall and the bottom 6 inches were reserved for the ball, strike, and out tallies. Each inning was 2.5 inches wide with the runs double that at 5 inches and I left the rest for my team names.

The easiest way I know to transfer in this case was printing out my logo then covering the back with a nice, healthy layer of chalk. I then traced the front of the image, leaving a nice, faint chalk outline to fill in! I did this with all my lettering.

The Sharpie paint marker proved a little frustrating here but I overcame. I highly recommend painting with an actual acrylic and a liner brush.

The finished product! It took me a couple hours and a lot of patience with that damned marker but VOILA! The perfect present. :)

Project Life Part 1

A Beautiful Mess is one of my absolute favorite blogs that I follow.  A while back, Elsie had started talking about this Project Life project she was starting and, to me, it sounds like an amazingly sweet way to capture the good things in life in a little book.  Her posts about Project life can be found here and here!

The idea and the foundation of this project can be found at this site, along with some ways to get started and buy supplies.  Frankly, I have a couple of $5 cardstock books from WalMart and a wire-bound sketch pad that I'm planning to transform for the project in the near future.

I will be posting some pictures soon (a.k.a. when I actually print pictures to start the book) in Part 2 and keep you updated as I go along through the year.

DIY Upcycled Corkboard

Well hello dere!

It's been a lovely few weeks here with the wonderful Miss E and we've finally had a day off together that didn't involve family parties (birthday, mother's day... all the days!), distracting boyfriends, or general exhaustion. We set out to do ALL THE THINGS. Well, we did some of the things... and ate a lot of food.

One of the things we tackled today was setting up our new "Command Center" in order to make sure we're both on the same page. You know, when you just don't catch the, "I won't be home for dinner tonight", as the other person whizzes past with a bagel in their mouth. Also known as "every morning".

Anyway, so here's how we started! I grabbed this currently defunct cork board from work. Now, someone obviously snagged it in the past from either a liquor store or a restaurant considering the fact it's a booze promotion. It's really just a red wooden frame with a cork board on one side and a cheap-o blackboard on the other, nothing super high end. Ask around non-chain restaurants/bars or liquor stores if they have any they're not using. I have to imagine they get more of these than they could ever even use...

Moving on... so we covered it! Because frankly, I prefer wine and no one in my family needs further reason to poke fun at my affinity for the drink or my inability to stop giggling after one or two. We used some leftover scrapbook paper rather than going out and buying poster backing. Since the dimensions on this particular cork board meant we needed at least three pieces of the same paper (we didn't have that), we opted to create a border around two pieces we liked. I simply just cut down the middle of the blue patterned paper (no need for a pretty edge, you're just going to hide it under the square bits in the center). The paper is stapled on so in the future, if we want to swap it out, no big deal. I toyed with the idea of modge podging it on or using the foam adhesive squares but eh, I wasn't that motivated. A few staples did nicely.

You could easily stop here and have a pretty nice corkboard. But we're overachievers and wanted to be able to catch our mail on this "command center". So I stole borrowed some bully clips from work to hang from the edge of our board. Originally, I planned to just use a few small nails and hang them that way. While I was searching the drawers for the plastic case, I began to realize my mother may have taken them with her when she took her tool kit to the new house. D'OH. But I found something  better! Small screw-in hooks! We so fancy.

First, I measured out how much space I was going to need between the hooks. We had enough room for eight of them. I made my marks and lightly tapped a thumbtack to make a starting hole for the hooks to thread on to. They weren't too hard to screw in, you can get about halfway with your fingers before succumbing to pliers.

But be careful you don't accidentally break the hook with your She-Hulk force...

Oops. This is when you cover the broken post with red marker, whistle innocently, and screw a second hook in right next to the broken one...

Here's the finished product! Easy peesy lemon squeezy, right?

Let the pinning begin!

DIY Party: Centerpiece Ideas

Hey everyone!  Welcome to the first installment of the DIY Party series!  This is going to be five sections of DIY party ideas that I have found (and love!) through Pinterest and I cannot wait to start using them!

First off, I found possibly the cutest way to recycle cans from tomatoes or canned fruits.

All you have to do is clean out the can, cover with funky duct tape (which come in a thousand patterns and colors now) and add a ribbon.  So cute and simple, I can't believe I hadn't though of it before now.

Next, from Smart School House, I found this adorable and incredibly easy way to have flower lights be a part of the table without the real-life flames and fire hazard.

Here, I found a great fall centerpiece. Yes, I've already got my mind on fall, but when don't I?  I absolutely love this idea and I tried it last year with my preschool class but my hair dryer is cheap and didn't get hot enough so I'm determined to try again (and succeed) this year.

Finally, I saw this really cute idea on Pinterest, but the source was just the picture itself.  The idea is to have a styrofoam ball and a large candle holder.  Candle holders generally have a spike that goes through the bottom of the candle, which you will need to poke through the bottom of the styrofoam ball.  Then, poke the sticks of as many lollipops as you can fit into the styrofoam to make this cute little "Sucker Ball".

Thanks for stopping by!  Next DIY is party games!

DIY Hooded Vest Part 1

Hey everyone! Today is going to be the first installment of a two part project I started a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to put into the project just yet, but hopefully I'll be able to finish it within the next few weeks.

So, every year in May there is a Zombie March in Boston, MA that I absolutely love. The past few years that I've attended, I've been dressed as a zombie with the people that I go with but this year, one of my friends and I decided that we wanted to go as survivors instead of zombies and have been piecing together costumes together bit by bit.

My friend had bought an awesome cowl hood (which can be found here) and vest (here) from Etsy.

Unfortunately, not all of us can afford to spend that kind of money on super awesome costumes and just have to try to do it ourselves, so here's the beginning of my step by step process to make a hooded vest from an old pull over hoodie!

Step One – Rip off the sleeves. I plan to hem these again so that they aren't so wide and don't have that 80's padded-shoulder look to them anymore later on. Also, I ripped the front pocket off and the bottom elastic.

Step Two – Lay flat and find the center. Once the hoodie is flattened, measure from one side to the other side, divide by two and mark the center. I made three marks: one by the neckline, one in the middle of the belly-area, and another at the bottom. Connect the marks with a ruler and draw a straight line all the way down the front. Then, here's the scary part, cut down the center line.

After ripping off the sleeves and drawing the line.

Step Three – (Optional) I tried a few ways to try to get the design off of the hoodie, but none of them really worked very well. I tried the nail polish remover trick, which got a small part of the design to come up, but not enough to actually make it go away. I then tried to scrap it off (while it was soft) with a pocket knife. In the end, I just decided that I would cover up the entire design with a patch of some sort after dying the fabric.

Step Four – (Also optional) My hoodie was a deep maroon color, so I decided to try to bleach out a bit of the color before dying it black. I don't want the black to be the blackest black (since I'm trying to look post-apocalyptic and worn) so I thought this step might lighten it up in the end. Conversely, it could make the fabric soak up more dye and make it darker in the end, but I suppose we'll see when I get to it.

After being bleached to hell three times.. still pinkish.

Step Five – Line the inside of the hoodie. I hate the pill-y look hoodies get after being worn for a while and since the fabric folds over a bit where the two sides meet in the front, I decided I would cover it up. I took an old t-shirt and repeated Step One and Two, then pinned it inside the hoodie as the lining.

Unfortunately, this is all I've been able to accomplish so far, but stay tuned for Part Two!