For the budding artist!

My 4 year old is finishing up his first year of preschool. Anybody who knows anything about preschool knows that it involves a lot of artwork. Whether it be paint, markers, stamps, stickers or crayons, you can always count on my son bringing home a masterpiece!

You've already seen the chaos on my fridge, so I had to come up with something other than the refrigerator to display my boy's art. I've seen ideas similar to this in classrooms and other families homes so I spent some time wandering the aisles of Hobby Lobby brainstorming and here's what I came up with....

I had plenty of paints and scrapbook paper and letters so I just had to buy the wood plaque and the clothes pins.

Plaque - $7
Clothes pins $.97 (a pack of 50 at Walmart! They make great chip clips as well so my family is going to have to start opening a lot of bags of chips!)

First thing I did was flip the wood over and trace it on to the backside of my scrapbook paper.

I carefully cut out the pieces to glue onto the face of my wooden plaque. I got out my spray adhesive (I have a love/hate thing going on with this stuff!) and adhered the pieces carefully to my board. BUT WAIT!!! Here's where I reveal to you that I'm not perfect. I tried to keep the illusion going but I had a moment of impaired crafting and It was photographed so there's no way out of it. I should have painted the plaque first! But I was eager to use my adhesive so I had to paint the edges after I glued the paper on. No biggy. I just had to paint very carefully!



So I painted my edges and then I painted my clothes pins.



When it was all dry I sand the edges and I used distress ink give it a little character.



Since my plaque was just covered in paper I felt like I needed to protect it so I went over it with a clear, glossy varnish. I also added just a tiny dab of distress ink to the varnish so the paper would have a bit of an aged look.



And after it had plenty of time to dry, it was time to place everything and glue it all down! And now look what is hanging in the playroom...



Can you think of a better way to display your child's artwork?!

Happy Friday!