I'm extremely intimidated by this whole #made4math thing because I'm not "girly" - I'd rather go to a ballgame than go shopping, I have NO desire to figure out what "magic" Mike has and I can barely match my clothes which is why I usually buy black, denim, and khaki (cuz THAT's easy).
Having said that, there WAS this one time at Hobby Lobby when I got somewhat creative.
I wanted a sign for my door. All the "cool kids" on the faculty were doing it, and I wanted one, too. But they had theirs made and I'm just NOT giving someone $50 to do something I can do trashier for a cheaper price. Here some examples I found on Pinterest to show you what kinds of signs I was going up against:
So I went to Hobby Lobby and bought a canvas. All the other teacher signs were kind of small and I have a SLIGHT Napoleon complex, so I wanted mine to be larger. Then I went to a ribbon isle for the first time in my LIFE and, miraculously, found a blue, green, and yellow plaid ribbon that was pretty cool.
So off to the paint section I went to find colors to match this ribbon. This wasn't as easy for me as you'd think. Not gonna lie, I had to ask three different people, "Is this paint the same color as this?" I decided to make the background of the sign blue and green and that I'd paint my name in yellow.
Oh crap... paint my name?? WHAT AM I THINKING??? I can barely WRITE my name neatly, much less PAINT the frackin' thing PERMANENTLY on a SIGN!! So I started putting things back - this was NOT going to work for me. As I pouted, I happened to accidentally go down an isle where I found wooden letters cut out in this really funky font. **AHA!!** THAT is what I'll use for my name!! My last name is 9 letters long, but most kids shorten it to 5. I grabbed those letters, sat on the floor of Hobby Lobby (I kid you not), and arranged them until they all fit.
So I came home with the following supplies I bought and scrounged up from around the house:
1 big ol' canvas
3 spools of ribbon
1 roll of painters tape
2 sponge brushes
1 can of yellow spray paint
1 bottle of blue acrylic paint
1 bottle of green acrylic paint
hot glue gun and sticks
1. Day 1, you've got to figure out your inside shape. I didn't trust myself to do an oval or anything with curves, I went with a rectangle. Then you need to figure out how large you want that inside shape to be. I didn't really care. :)
2. I put the painters tape down to outline the inside rectangle and I painted the inside rectangle one night. Painted, let dry, painted 2nd coat, let dry.
3. Day two, I took the painters tape off and put NEW tape down on the edges of the inside rectangle so that I could paint the outside one. Painted, let dry, painted 2nd coat, let dry.
4. In the meantime, I spray painted the funky letters for my name and let those dry as well.
5. So at the beginning of day 3, this is what I had:
Looked pretty good to me, but I realized I needed to put the ribbon on BEFORE I put the letters on. I took the ribbon and hot-glued it to the border of the sign, folding over the corners and hot-gluing the corners so that they weren't visible from the front.
6. So then I thought, "how am I gonna hang this sucker?" I took the leftover ribbon, cut a long strip, hot-glued the ends to the frame on the back of the sign and thought, "well, THAT was easy."
7. Not gonna lie, the letters were the hardest part. That's the predominant part people see first so it has to be perfect. The letters were really thin so that made it a little tougher. Aaaand, I might be somewhat of a klutz, so some burns were involved. Don't worry - you'll be fine.
And here's the end product:
So even though I did this a while ago, it's my submission for #made4math so far. I'm off to Home Depot for my next project.
