Day Fourteen: whiteboard

In my room presently I have a very nice setup that I got the idea for from a friend of mine. I have two white boards and two bulletin boards side-by-side (bulletin/whiteboard on top, whiteboard/bulletin on bottom), screwed into the wall. It keeps me very organized. The problem with this is that I can't take them with me, because I'd create giant holes in the wall where the screws were, and also I've painted my room since I put them in so there would be a large navy blue square where the boards used to be. I could have perhaps gone out and bought something similar for my new apartment, but then I saw this at paper n stitch and thought it was BRILLIANT. Especially since I have a million Ikea poster frames that are sitting around doing nothing.

Materials:
- picture/poster frame, any size (I got mine at Ikea, but you can probably just use any)
- some kind of fancy backing, paper or fabric or something (I used my awesome damask scrapbook paper)
- paper cutter
- tape
- I didn't use a ruler, but it might work out better if you did

Before I started, I made a small mark in the corner of the plastic part of the frame, waited a couple of hours, and then erased it to see if it would erase. I am so proud of myself for thinking ahead like this. It did erase, but I found that it erased better if I let it dry fully than if I made a mark and erased it immediately. This may hold true for all whiteboards and I've never noticed up until now.

So, the first step was deciding which of the 180 sheets of damask paper I wanted to use. This was a very tough decision. I made sure to choose the least-busy ones, because the words on the whiteboard needed to be the first thing seen, not the pattern.

I narrowed it down to the bottom-right pink or the bottom-middle green/blue, then tried to fill the frame to see what it would look like. This wasn't really effective, because I only have three sheets of each pattern, and I didn't want to cut them up before I knew they would be right. 

I ended up going with this one, because I didn't have any secondary colors that would look good with the pink. I used the cardboard backing as a guide to how to cut the paper - it is at this point that I think you should use a ruler. Basically two sheets side-by-side and then a third chopped in half makes an even rectangle shape.

Then I used solid yellow to fill up the rest of the frame - ideally I would have had enough damask paper to do this without the other colour, but I didn't want to buy anything new for this project. I measured the yellow paper against the cardboard backing for the frame, folded to indicate where I should cut, and then cut.

Then I turned it over so the white side of all this was facing me, and taped it all together so it matched up with the cardboard, stuck it in, and closed the whole thing up.

Super easy. In the words of the website I found the link to this project on, "Let's all kick ourselves now for not thinking of this sooner."

It would probably look better without the yellow border, but I really wanted to use that paper for it. Maybe I'll get a smaller frame the next time I'm at Ikea, so it will fit perfectly. Also, I'm going to paint the frame, I'm just not sure what colour yet. So between that and the laptop bag, I have two unfinished projects on the go. Way to be productive.

Day Fourteen Highlights: success again!, lovely damask paper, stealing good ideas from friends.

Day Fourteen Lowlights: not quite having enough paper, starting things and not finishing them.

Tomorrow: probably I should finish the two things I have left unfinished. We'll see.