Doodlebook

My latest crafting project is one for my daughter. I saw this on Pinterest one day, and thought it was a great idea!

(Here’s the link to original blog post on ‘All For the Boys’. http://www.allfortheboys.com/home/2013/2/18/surviving-sick-days-diy-dry-erase-book.html)

Here’s mine for my little girl!

At family gatherings I asked everybody for a photo of them to use in a special project for Ellie. They happily obliged, and I went work. I booted up Photoshop and first made all my photos black and white. Then I reduced the opacity on them to about 60%, so the black marker would really pop. Just print them out and slip them in a clear plastic sleeve. I used super low print quality to save on ink (hence the white lines across the photos) and printed on plain printer paper too. I’m thinking next time I update the photos I’ll add everyone’s name to the pages too (Mommy, Daddy, Mimi, etc.) She knows who they are, but she’s really starting to learn her letters, and that would be a great visual aid!

Eraser cloth and marker storage.

When it came time to cover the binder, I debated sewing an actual sleeve for it. . .for about 45 seconds. I really went the lazy route with this craft and decided gluing would be much less effort. So, armed with my hot glue gun, I got to work. The material is a vintage sheet I got at a yard sale for $1.00. (I have a habit of snagging vintage sheets at yard sales since I love the patterns. . .my closet is rapidly filling up). I hastily cut out a (very uneven) rectangle to cover the binder and glued it down. Then, I cut out a nice even piece to fit over the inside so it looks (halfway) pretty! Note I did not hem any edges at all – I stuck with purely hot glue for this project, and I didn’t cut the squares big enough to fake a hem using folds with glue, whoops. The pen and eraser cloth pockets were made by the same method – cut out a piece of fabric and hot glue all the edges down! Works quite efficiently!

For the cover, I ‘hemmed’ the title piece with hot glue – folding over the edges and hot gluing them down so you have a (roughly) even rectangle to write on. I found a font I liked (it’s called Pea Ellie Bellie – check out my Pinterest board here for a link to download it!) and free-handed the lettering onto the fabric with a pencil – believe it or not you can actually erase pencil from fabric. Then I traced over it with a Sharpie, and glued it to the cover! Done!

I made it for my daughter to play with, I swear. . .but my hubby always said he wanted to be a pirate!

Total cost of this project for me was $3.00 – I had to purchase the clear sleeves for the paper. My mum had a three ring binder for me to use, and I had everything else. I suppose the cost of printer ink is in there too somewhere. But it’s easy and cheap, and I like that as she get’s older we can update the photos, or even add new things in there for her to draw on! It’ll be great for car rides in another year or so – I guess whenever I trust her with a dry erase marker unsupervised!