Saturday, October 13, 2012

Pinterest-inspired Paint Chip Calendar

Today I knocked off one of the projects on my must-make Pinterest list! This is my twist on a combination of the paint chip calendar and a DIY dry erase board. 

To start, I picked up an assortment of pretty paint chips, an inexpensive poster board frame (18"x24"), and a can of spray paint for plastic. When I was standing in front of the paint chips, it occurred to me I should use my very favorite fabric design in the background and picked paint chips accordingly. The frame I bought was black plastic, so I picked up a dark brown spray paint. 


I didn't take pictures of the frame painting process, but it was quick and easy. Just take out the plexiglass, lay the frame out on cardboard headed for the recycle bin, and spray away!

The paint chips were an odd 3 1/4"x5" so I cut them in half, then trimmed 1/2" off the width so they fit my frame better. I liked that the color names showed, so I left them but you could trim the text off. I used some of the scrap as the days of the week labels. The photo below is when I was playing with placement, but before I trimmed the 1/2" off the sides. I trimmed the pieces down to 2 1/2" x 2 5/8".


I considered several different ways to attach my fabric and decided on using Heat & Bond fusible adhesive to both attach the fabric to the cardboard frame backing and the paint chips to the fabric. I like how well the Heat & Bond worked for attaching the fabric, but knowing what I do now, I wouldn't use it again for the paint chips. The text on couple of the chips smeared a bit and one of them seemed to leave a bit of paint on my iron which transferred to another paint chip. Happily it's not noticeable once the whole thing is assembled! Here is my finished calendar with a few of this month's activities added to it with dry erase markers.