Something from Nothing

There’s very few things in this world that feel better than scoring an awesome deal.  Which is why you can usually find these copy cats perusing the clearance aisles of our favorite craft stores scouring for the best of the bargains.  A few months ago on a bargain hunt in Michael’s we came across these unfinished wood pieces that were marked way, way, WAY down.  Like $1 a piece down. And while we had NO idea what we would or could do with them, we just couldn’t resist the bargain. So we plopped them in our carts and took them home and waited for inspiration to strike.

And we waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Fast forward two months and nearly a dozen craft nights later and we found ourselves standing in front of our big table ‘o craftiness staring at our supplies and wondering what project we should tackle. My eyes zeroed in on our lonely wooden friends and simultaneously saw the glorious can of chalkboard paint sitting nearby. And in that instant, inspiration was born, the pieces fell into place, and our barren wooden wonders finally had their purpose.

We started by giving them a quick coat of white spray paint to act as a primer of sorts and so that the base would be white instead of the natural wood color.  Once that was dry we took a foam brush and brushed on three coats of chalkboard paint.

A word of warning with this paint: when you paint it on it has a blue tint and it looks VERY streaky. I honestly had my doubts.  But once it dried it was perfectly smooth and had that lovely chalkboard color we were going for.

Once they were completely dry we dug around in the ribbon stash we’ve been working so hard to build and came up with two we liked. Using the glue gun we made a border out of the ribbon around all four sides of the chalkboard.

TA-DA!  An adorable Christmas countdown! And in our house, the red & white polka dots can double as an unofficial NC State scoreboard on game days!

We love the way these turned out.  Such a simple project- it was super easy to do and really inexpensive. The moral of this story? Those random clearance aisle craft finds are worth it. Even if you don’t have any plans for them now—if the bargain is good enough—snatch them up and store them for later! You never know when the perfect project will come along.

Now for the deets, here’s your Copy Cat rundown:

Total time:  3 months? Just kidding! From start to finish it took a little over an hour. But it wasn’t tedious work so we didn’t mind!

Total cost: Unfinished wood thing-a-ma-bobs: $1.99 each; Ribbon: I’d say we used about $1 worth total on both. Chalkboard paint: This particular can cost around $13 at Lowe’s. But since I already had it and I have pretty much the entire can left, I’m calling it free. J Total Cost for 2: $5 BOO-YAH.

Would we do this again? Sure! We love easy projects with near-instant gratification. And with our addiction to the clearance aisles at an all time high, we foresee many more similar projects in our future!