They’re everywhere. I walk down the street in my neighborhood, and I see these beautiful wooden signs that say “Welcome” and “Home”. During the holiday seasons they say the trendiest things; “Let it snow” and “Baby it’s cold outside”. In the Fall, I’m obsessed with the pumpkin designs and sayings like, “Warning: Fall Obsessed”.
I’ve seen these signs in department stores everywhere. They’re literally just signs with paint on them. I think to myself, “All that money on one sign for one season? And then I’ll need another for another season?Where would I even store all these signs?” That’s far from affordable or practical for our family.
I’ve also heard of people doing these signs themselves and thought, “That’s for crafty people without kids”. Yet I just created my very own chalkboard sign with my kids! It was affordable and came out looking just like the expensive signs available at department stores. How did I manage to do this? With Plata Chalkboards!
When I talked to Karen from Plata Chalkboards about her Chalkboard Craft Kits she made it sound easy. A chalkboard with magnetic stencils and waterproof chalk markers that made creating a beautiful DIY sign very easy to do. So easy in fact, that I decided to bravely involve my kids on this project.
Our family loves arts and crafts! Our dining room table is also our craft table, and you can tell as it’s often covered in glue, paint and markers. For Christmas every year we sit down and paint ornaments. It’s the most anticipated part of Christmas for everyone in our home. But the mess is definitely the downside. Plus, my youngest daughter’s ornaments will always turn out a muddy color after she’s combined all the paint colors.
The kit included everything we needed to get started crafting our very own sign. Besides the large metal chalkboard, it came with both large capital letter stencils and lowercase cursive letters, plus six of the waterproof but erasable paint pens. They also offer lots of fun seasonal and holiday stencil packs to mix and match to really spark your family’s creativity.
Working with the stencils from Plata Chalkboards made creating the sign with my kids so easy! The stencils stuck to the board and helped our youngest daughter color perfectly within the lines to make a perfect looking flower. My husband preferred outlining the stencil design with chalk and then free handing it.
As this was our first sign, I wanted it to look perfect. So, I insisted everyone only do designs with use of the stencils from Plata Chalkboards. The kids got to choose where they wanted to place flower stencils and what colors they wanted to use. This was as far as I let their creativity go this time. My 7yr old daughter asked about free handing some designs on the chalkboard and I offered we try that next time.
My husband did at one point color over one of the letters too much (Mr.Perfectionist) and made the ink run under the stencil. Cleaning this up was easy to do with the sponge included within our kit and some vinegar, as the instructions said to do.
Everyone felt proud of our sign when it was done, and it was such a fun time together! Unfortunately, as we live in a town house, there’s nowhere to place this sign outside our door. But lucky us, we get to make it a statement piece and focal point on the wall in our dining room.
I’m really looking forward to Fall when I get to wipe this sign down and put a fun pumpkin spice saying on there with pumpkins all around!
This Chalkboard Craft Kit is available on Plata Chalkboards website www.platachalkboards.com
And be sure to check out the video of our time spent creating this sign on our Instagram page @maturing.mama
