After a long dry spell I finally had a crafty weekend, or should I say week? I had a friend over for a few days and it was fun to spend some time crafting with her.
The highlight of my weekend was making a menu board for my kitchen. Menu planning is something I have always struggled with, and I have loved some of the menu boards I have seen on friends' blogs and on Pinterest. This weekend I finally had the joy of making my own! Yay!
Here is what the board looked like when I began. I decided to use this particular board largely because, though we have several corkboards in the house, it was the first/only one we could find at the moment I decided I was making my menu board RIGHT NOW! LOL My poor hubby - he is so patient with me!
He even tried it on the wall to make sure it was going to fit vertically or horizontally so that I would be safe no matter where my creative juices led!
I had some leftover checkered paper and green paper I really wanted to use as they are my favourite colours, and chose a pink for the background. I also had some labels left over from the ones I made to label my kitchen cupboards so inked the edges of them in the same purple that I used on the labels, then stamped MENU on them. From there I was not really sure where to go and started playing around with multiple ideas.
I knew I wanted two pockets on it, and was originally toying with making them from envelopes but was afraid that would not be sturdy enough to last in my house. Finally I had a brilliant idea - I emptied the playing cards out of two boxes then cut the tops off to get the size I wanted. I then scored my cardstock and covered them, and added labels that matched my title.
At this point in time I got completely stuck and felt like I was going nowhere fast. I also discovered that our clothes pins are either missing or still packed, so now I had a good excuse to make a run to the dollar store. I am so glad I did! While there I found lots of embellishments in my favourite colours, and a perfect match for this board! I also found a jumbo-sized clothespin. I wasn't sure how that was going to mesh with my whole menu board but I knew I loved it and would find a way!
Back home the creative juices started to really flow! However, the background seemed a bit blah, and when Amanda offered a piece of purple paper instead we knew we had a winner! What a difference the brighter purple made! The clothespins got covered in the same green paper as the card boxes. I then wrote the days of the week on the little ones so that I would know where in my week I was at, then modpodged to make them hold up better to being handled. I used wood glue to attach everything, largely because I couldn't find my hot glue gun. I have three or four of them and they have all grown legs and wandered off, probably with the scissors and nail clippers! What's with that anyway? I digress...
I glued everything on, added some pretties, and voila! A menu board! I especially love how the large clothes pin provides balance to the other side of the board, where I also have space for building my grocery list.
Here is a close-up of the menu side (and thanks to Tanner for the photos):
I chose to label my boxes "Planned Meals" and "Menu Ideas" as my shopping rarely lines up with the calendar. That way when I shop I can add all the meals I have ingredients for to the "Planned Meals" box and work from there when setting up my schedule for each week. If I end up moving things around, unused meals go back in that box again, and once we have eaten them, the card returns to the "Menu Ideas" box. For now I have also put in some blank cards and a pen as I didn't want to think through my whole menu in one shot
I am so excited to use my pretty board, and my kids are excited because Mummy managed to plan dinner before 6 at night two nights in a row!
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