Class birthdays! ~~My First EVER Monday Made it!

Best thing about summer I get to be crafty! 

So I am linking up for the very first time with 4thGradeFrolics and Monday Made it!

Ok. If you saw this post you knew that I wanted to make this birthday board but for my class:

So I went to Michael's and got all my supplies.  (I ended up not useing the foam letters as I wanted white letters...and the frog was something I painted in Mexico. lol)

SO the first thing I needed to do was prime all my wood.  I like to do this because it is MUCH easier to make any color paint go smoothly onto white paint than on to wood grain.    I did not have any primer so I just used white spray paint. 

I started with the large piece of wood. 

And did short sweeping motions to get a nice even coat.  I did not worry about the back as it was going to be up against the wall. 

I also primed all 200 of my tokens. 

I decided that I was going to paint the large part of the birthday sign navy so I did...using my Martha Stewart Spray Painting kit.  You can find the review of that on this post.  

.

I was not using the Martha Stewart paint like the kit said to I was just using the Michal's brand or the brand Folkart.

I was also painting the parts to my hall passes but here is my sweet little set up I had to house all of my tokens.

Once everything is painted and dry (the tokens need to be super dry for this part) I got out my drill...

And my 1/16th drill bit.

I used a cardboard box (that I incidentally used when spray painting a different project) as a means for the drill to go through the token but not either break on the concrete or drilling through the table.

I did not measure these out I just drilled and I made sure that they were close enough to the sides so that when I needed to put the jump rings on them they would fit!

Now.  I do not know how many students I am going to have let alone anyones birthdays so I just went ahead and put a hole on both sides of EVERY token.  If you know...you could leave the bottom one for each moth with out a hole on the bottom...But I also want to reuse this year after year so.....

Two Holes it is!

Now I needed to get to the point where I could decorate the main board. I forgot to take a picture of it but I had an oval that I wanted to put my name on and then "Class Birthdays" on the rest of the board.  The first thing I did was measure the oval and made one on PPT that was the exact same size. Once I made it the same size I colored it red and inserted a text box and played around with fonts until I found one I liked.  This one happens to be HelloIshBig by Hello Literacy (you can download her fonts on TPT here!) 

Once I decided on a font I switched it back to a white oval and printed it out. 

Then I got a charcoal pencil in a light color. 

I flipped the sheet of paper that I just printed out over and rubbed the charcoal all over the letters.  You could probably do this with a regular pencil too.  I just wanted to use the charcoal to make sure I could brush off any remains that ended up on the painting.

Once I rubbed the chalk all over the back of the letters I flipped it back over and placed it on the red oval.  I used a really sharp pencil and traced the lines that I printed out. 

When you take it away the chalk is transferred to the wood shape. 

Yay!

Then I did the exact same thing for "Class Birthdays" and the letters for each month.  The letters are again HelloIshBig but the "Class Birthdays" is done in KG Beneath Your Beautiful (you can get that font here!)

Then, I just started to paint them in. 

While that was drying I got the chalk paint.  This is a glaze that you can put on ANYTHING and turn it into a chalk board.  I painted all of my tokens by the instructions of, paint one coat, wait two hours then paint a second coat and wait 24 hours. 

AFter I painted all of my tokens and the bbirthday board was dry I got 12 of these eye hooks. 

I carefully screwed in one of the hooks under each letter for the calendar.  I made sure they were all facing the same way. Ignore the giant mess. 

After I did this I went around all of the letters with a bright color to make them pop!

This is the most tedious and painful step in my opinion.  You need to put jump rings on all of your tokens to hang them from the board and from each other.  You can get all three of these things in the jewlery making section of Michaels

I went through and put one jump ring on each hole on each token.  I then went and put one jump ring on each eye hook.

Finally for "effect" I put a few on each month just to see how this puppy would look!

I AM FREAKING IN LOVE!

I can not wait to meet my 6ers and find out their birthdays and fill this sucker out.  I love that I used the chalk board paint so I can reuse this every year!!!!!!

How do you display birthdays?

Cheers,