Week 2: Chalkboard Tray

This week's project was a cute chalk board to hang on my wall.  I had this pretty tray that a friend gave me a few years ago.  I love the shape of it and thought it would make a perfect chalk board.  Sorry for some of the awful pictures.  Aside from painting the tray this project, like most of my projects, was done late at night with horrible lighting.

I spray painted it red to match my red and aqua color scheme.

I didn't worry about the middle since it would be covered by the chalk board vinyl.

I had tried to use chalk board paint before and didn't have very good luck with it.  So I was super excited to find this chalk board vinyl at Hobby Lobby.  Its $7.99 for a big roll, and of course I used a 40% off coupon on mine.

Figuring out how to cut the vinyl the match the shape of the tray was a little tricky.  I finally decided to lay some thin tissue paper on top of the tray and used a highlighter to trace the shape.  You could use any writing utensil, I just happened to have a highlighter near.

 

I taped the tissue paper to the chalk board vinyl and cut it out.

At first the vinyl had lots of bubbles in it from being rolled up.  You can smooth these right out.

I added a bow to hand the chalk board from and ta da!
I still have a little touch up to do (the perfectionist in me isn't completely satisfied with it yet) but overall I'm really happy with how it turned out.  Since I already had the paint, tray, and ribbon for the bow the entire project only cost $4.79.