Baby Shower Crafts

Okay, so I can't take credit for this one at all. This was my cousin's idea. She found the idea for an alphabet wall in the nursery on pinterest, and thought it would be fun if at her baby shower, all of the attendees painted/decorated a letter of the alphabet to put up in the nursery. Super cute idea, right!? Anyways, even though I didn't do any of the planning/supply purchasing for the project, I wanted to share since it's such a fun idea!

My cousin and aunt bought a variety of all the letters needed to complete the alphabet. In order to make the alphabet wall look unique, they didn't just buy all of the letters in the same font/style/material. Some of the letters were made of particle board and were relatively flat, while others were made of cardboard and were quite three dimensional. Take a peek in the photos below. 

Some of the items my cousin and aunt purchased to help decorate the letters were: modge podge, stickers that matched the theme/colors of the nursery, paint, paint brushes, buttons, other larger embellishments (flowers, etc.), and scrapbook paper. 

Here are some of the letters drying after guests at the shower painted them. You can see the A covered in hot glued buttons, the I painted on the sides and then modge podged with scrapbook paper to add a pattern. The R and the G were carefully painted with designs, while the V and the U have a few stickers stuck on them. Some turned out much cuter than others...obviously ;)

This is the letter I painted. I used the pink paint that you can see in the photo. Once that dried, I painted it with a clear glitter paint. Finally, I added a flower embellishment and a few pearl stickers to the ends. Elegant and simple!

Happy Baby Shower crafting!

Paint Chip Calendar

As soon as I saw this idea on Pinterest I just couldn't wait to give it a try. I made this a little over a year ago shortly after I got my job right out of school. I thought this calendar was perfect for my desk at work. I could keep track of important work events and have a conversation piece in my cube.

I've seen this calendar done with more similar colors, but I decided to go with basically all the colors of the rainbow. The first step in creating this amazing calendar is making a trip to the hardware store to pick out paint chips. I hate it when any sales associate talks to me in a store, which is inevitably what you ask for by standing in front of the paint chip display for like ten minutes. I'm sure the paint guy either thought I was painting my house a crazy rainbow array of colors or he caught on that I was using him for his paint chips. In order to get the right size squares for this calendar, I grabbed the paint chips that have only 4 colors on them. For each color I took 2 paint chips and I picked which colors made the best ombre array for each hue.

The next most obvious item you need for this project is a frame. I went with a 19" x 15" size frame for this project. I also bought a poster board from the dollar store to use to mount the paint chips to. After cutting the poster to size, I laid out all the paint chips and made final decisions on the color arrays. For the days of the week across the top, I used a light color that looked almost identical to the lightest color in the array. I wrote the days of the week using Sharpie on the small cut-outs. The numbers don't go on the paint chips, they get written on the glass since that changes every month. After taping everything down, you're done! Now all you need is some dry erase markers and some fun events to fill up the calendar with.

Happy ombre-ing! :)