I'm In!!!

I'm in with the in-crowd! I go where the in-crowd go-o-oes! Kudos to you if you can sing along with that AND a big "I'm sorry," if you now have that song stuck in your head.

Not sure if I've mentioned this, but I'm a bit of an outsider 'round these here parts. See, I'm an out of towner...worse yet, and out of STATER. Not sure what it is about me (perhaps the tongue piercing and penchant for wearing my hair in pig-tailed knots), but I stick out. The other Mom's at the preschool routinely forget to notify me of upcoming parties and events that I should attend.

I'll be honest with ya, I don't really care to actually BE friends with these people so much as I just don't want to be left out of semi-important events at the school.

So, on to how I got IN. One of the little little girls in the Twinster's class had a birthday party coming up and I knew exactly what I wanted to take. I had seen this little project here, and having just emptied the twins' school bags of eleventy-million art projects, knew this would be the perfect gift to display all of these masterpieces.

I trotted over to the lumber yard where my girlfriend works and described my project. She went out to the lumber and brought me a piece of wood, a 1 x 6 with a slight lip in the bottom (which I adored, gave it that little something extra), and it was about 5ft long. I also picked up some colored chipboard letters at the Walmart, and some alligator clips (ok, first I bought the wrong kind, which is why they are crossed out in the pic).
The Dude cut my board down to roughly two feet. I didn't measure, I just eyeballed it and said "cut here."
Then I started to Kilz the thing.
I had that feeling. You know, where you feel like someone is watching you. So I look up.

He was supervising, see. He declared that I was doing it all wrong and promptly took over.

After he finished, I stepped back and decided I didn't like it plain white, so I went to scrounge through my scrapbook papers and pulled out these.

The Dude protested, "Wait! Why did I just paint this thing then?!" I don't know, why did you?! Sheesh.

I tore the papers to the desired widths (again, no measuring involved, just eyeballed it), got out the Mod Podge and set to work. When the Mod Podge had set a little, I laid out my letters and fiddled with the arrangement for a while before finally gluing those puppies down with craft glue.

When it was completely dry, I sanded the edges cuz they looked like this:

Here's a close up of the clips I ended up using. I also tied a little ribbon on them, ya know, to jazz it up. The clips were attached with a roofing nail. Why a roofing nail you ask? Well, because the heads were big enough to keep the clips from falling off. On the site I linked you to, they used smaller nails and just made the clip hole smaller by tying ribbon around it. Your choice.

At the party, when the presents were opened, my gift got the biggest response from the mothers. Lots of "Where did you get that?! I need one of those!!" Picture the smug grin on my face as I proclaimed that I had made it. "How do you have time for that?" "Oh you're so creative!" "You should sell those! I would absolutely buy one!"

I left that party with a huge smile on my face. The Dude offered me a high five on the way out and said, "Awesome job on the gift. I think it went over well."