I’m so happy with my little Christmas chalkboard that I made. It was soooo easy. I’ll show you how.
First of all, I didn’t have a chalkboard that would fit on my kitchen counter but I had a frame. I bought this frame years ago, on clearance, at Hobby Lobby. If I remember correctly, it was 50% off of $6.39. It measures 11 x 14 so that was a really good deal! I wanted my frame to be white so I got out the Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.
And I painted it using “Old White”.
I also painted my hands… it never fails!
Then, I needed an actual chalkboard to go in the frame. I bought a piece of gessoed board at Michael’s. It’s over in the professional art section, near the canvas and art paper. I found a board that measured 11 x 14. Ding, Ding, Ding – a perfect fit for my little frame. I painted the gessoed board using CHALKBOARD paint. This can be found at any craft store. I overlooked taking a photo of the ‘painting chalkboard step’ probably because I was too caught up in photographing my hand with paint on it… silly me!
Let the chalkboard paint (at least two coats) dry overnight and then before you use it, you need to prime it.
Do this by coloring the entire surface with chalk, then erase.
Next, you will need a piece of tracing paper. This is called “Chacopaper” and it is super hard to find unless you know where to look. Let me save you some time by telling you that it is next to the craft paint section at Michael’s. You would’ve spent hours looking in the art supply section without this little tidbit gem of information, you are welcome.
Next, you will need to decide on artwork for your board. I found these adorable FREE printables at Nest of Posies. Thank you, Kellie, for sharing these!!!
For this project, I chose the wreath so I printed it to fit an 11 x 14 frame.
Then I placed my tracing paper on my board and I taped the top and bottom.
I put my printed design on top of the tracing paper and taped it down, to hold it in place.
Then, using a ballpoint pen and a pretty good amount of pressure, I traced the entire design.
When I pulled back my tracing paper, this is what I had…
Then I used regular chalk to draw and color in the design.
This is what it looked like right after and this is what my work space (below) looked like after I was finished!
Here it sits on my kitchen counter, exactly where I wanted it.
I wish I had known about this little tracing trick when I made all those holiday chalkboards a couple of years ago…
If you don’t want to trace and want to draw one out the old fashioned way, here’s my tutorial…
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