Pinterest Success! |
I thought these crayon clothespins would be super cute to display my students' work in the hallway on my already existing clothesline. So first I bought 2 boxes of crayons. Then I had to figure out how to get the paper off the crayons without tearing it. This was a little more complicated.
One suggestion said to use a razor blade, so that's what I did. It took me a little trial and error to get it right, but finally I got it going. The glue they use to keep the paper on the crayon is super strong. When I was finished getting all the wrappers off, I noticed that the papers were still very much curled and would therefore be difficult to mod podge. So they spent the night under a heavy book to help flatten them out. Next, I trimmed each wrapper down to fit the width of my clips.
Then I used a sponge brush to spread some mod podge onto the clothespins and then placed the crayon wrapper on top. I held the crayon wrapper down on each clothespin for a few seconds because some were still trying to curl. By the time I finished the last clip, the first were already dry enough for their top coat.
So I went down the row again and spread mod podge onto the top and sides of each clothespin. I let them dry overnight. I absolutely love how these turned out! You can't tell from my picture, do to my sub-par photography skills, but the colors are very bright and pretty.
The only thing that bothers me about the finished product is that my clothespins were longer than the crayon wrappers. Obviously I can't make the wrappers longer, but I bought these clothespins at Hobby Lobby and noticed they were a bit longer and skinnier than ones from Walmart. I'll be doing this project again with the crayon wrappers from the other set of crayons and this time I'll make sure I use clothespins from Walmart instead.
The next next Pinterest inspired project is an organizational idea. Here is the original pin from the Clutter-free Classroom blog. A blog I absolutely love for great organizational ideas. Click the pin to check it out! I have been collecting bulletin board letters for several years but haven't really used them all that much.
It took so much time to go through each set and pick out the letters I wanted. And sometimes a set wouldn't have enough of the letters I needed, which I wouldn't realize until after I had spent 20 min punching out letters. Then when it was time to take that bulletin board down, the letters would end up in a ziplock bag because I didn't know what else to do with them. I knew I needed a better way to organize my letters I just couldn't think of one.
Until I saw this pin on Pinterest. First, I bought this cd case from Amazon. Click the picture to take you to the link. I looked a several cd cases and even considered buying the sleeves and binder separate. But in the end I went with this one. I'll explain why later on. So first thing I had to do was go through each of my bulletin board letter sets and punch out all the letters.
Some of the sets were easier to punch out than others. These round letters were a dream to punch out. After I punched the letters out, I put them in piles by letter. Then I put the letters into the cd sleeves. I used 3 pages (front and back) and 1 side of a page for each set of letters.
