DIY Monthly Picture Chalkboard

Happy ONE month Annie!!  This has, by far, been the best month of our lives so far!

I knew I wanted to do something fun and a little bit different for her monthly pictures.  I have seen pictures of people using chalkboards for things like monthly pictures, bump pictures, etc...so I thought something along those lines would be fun for her monthly pics!

I searched where you can find little chalkboards and one place that came up was JoAnn Fabrics...so Annie and I ventured out to JoAnn Fabrics on Friday to see what we could find.  While we were there, luckily my creative brain switched on!  I thought it would be fun to personalize the chalkboard instead of have it just be plain...so that's how I came up with the final product above :)  Here are a few pictures of the making of Annie's personalized chalkboard!

First, I picked out the frog decal that I wanted on the chalkboard.  Then from there, I picked out 2 paint colors that I thought would be fun with the froggie (one for the frame of the chalkboard, one for the letters and polka dots!).  First I painted the frame with the blue color using a sponge brush (showing in 2nd picture below in corner).  The paint dries pretty fast luckily!

Then, I made the polka dots using the back of a bamboo stick I already had at home!

I found these little packets of letters by Craftwood - each pack was only $0.99 for 5 letters!  And then I painted those with the pink.  They were a little bit trickier to paint because they are so small, but the sponge brush made it pretty easy to get in the small spaces. 

Annie was helping....

I let the frame and letters dry over night before putting on the frog and letters with the glue gun.

And voilá!  The final product!  Pretty darn easy - and pretty cheap too!  Altogether, it cost about $18 (and it was a little bit more because I had to buy a glue gun which cost $6!)

I'm sure I'll be making more of these in the future! Like for baby #2's bump pictures and monthly pictures! But that's a couple years down the road... :)