Beer and Crafts - a marriage (part 2)

I didn't stop with the chalkboard for Joshua. The chalkboard was part of how I envisioned the wall would look that our Keezer is on. Our dining space is essentially our brewery since we're living in such a small apartment. We started a coaster collection that my parent's helped us expand by finding a bunch of German ones at an antique store. If I'm being completely honest, the motivation for this project was just to have a place for them because I was sick of seeing them shoved in the closet. Our closet space is not plentiful so these babies needed somewhere to go. I used art paper from Michael's and bought frames at Joann's. These materials were stashed in the trunk since I knew Joshua wouldn't look there but like the chalkboard, there wasn't any time to work on it with out him home. I wasn't sure the best way to do this with out damaging one side of the coaster but luckily we had a lot of duplicates so I got over it. I used rubber cement on the paper and so far that has worked just fine.

The thermostat is on the wall that I wanted this on. It wasn't until I made everything that I noticed what an inconvenience that darn thermostat would be. I promise it doesn't look as awkward in person as it does in this picture.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how these look. Since they're older and from breweries that are less known I feel like it looks less like a college apartment. That is my goal at least. I'm finding it difficult to use our love of beer when it comes to decorating and still hope that classy could be used as an adjective for our choices.

Beer and Crafts - a marriage

For Christmas, I didn't do a whole lot of planning and didn't think much about what to make people until it was too late to execute or I had other projects to finish first and ran out of time. Joshua turned 25 in April. At the same time he had been sick for quite some time so he was home a lot of the weekends when normally he would be at work. The reason I say this is because I thought of his homemade birthday gifts quite awhile in advance but was not able to secretly execute with Joshua home all the time. So I ended up telling him what he would be getting and then he was home while I put it together. This turned out to be a very good thing for this project.

When we went to Colorado, one of the breweries had a chalkboard up with all of the stats of the beers they had on tap. So, now that we have a keezer with three beers on tap I decided it was the perfect time to make a small version of this chalkboard.

We have this poster from Joshua's coworker that I really like but that we don't really have a place for right now. So I decided to use the frame of the poster for the chalkboard. Not only did it save me money but it also allows me to safely store that poster until it could maybe be used in the future.

Through the blogosphere I found out that there is such thing as chalkboard contact paper. This stuff is so cool, I ended up using extra inside of our IKEA made pantry and use it for a Can Inventory of our Hurricane food stock. I found it on Amazon and could think of a ton more uses for this stuff!

The difficult part is using it over such a large space. Not having a lot of space and wanting to do this on a budget I think this was the best option for me but if I end up remaking this down the line I will most likely buy a large chalkboard or use chalkboard paint. The bubbles were hard to smooth out so I gave up on a few. It would have been a lot worse if Joshua wasn't around to help me lay it down.
I thought this would have been the best point to prime the chalkboard. With any chalkboard surface, you have to rub chalk all over it then erase to get it to work. It was probably unnecessary to do it at this point but it just made me get chalk all over myself, it didn't harm the finished product.

Now, the shape of the roll also prevented me from covering the entire surface. However, I realized this before buying it and planned to use the tape over the line where they would intersect. So I knew it might be a risk but it ended up turning out fine.

Now for the most annoying part of the whole thing. I used white electrical tape for the lines but it was twice the size I wanted it to be. I tried a few different things but could not halve the tape real successfully. Like the contact paper, it was more of a hassle than I expected but I'm still happier I went this route than painting.

I realized after starting to saw through it that it just wouldn't work. Luckily the score lines helped guide me when I gave up and used a scissors. Feel free to suggest a better way to do this for future reference. I could only find the white electrical tape as part of a set of different colors so I have a ton of the tape meaning I will need to figure out a better way to do this again.

I bought white paint to paint on the headings and our Yodeling Goat name at the top. So the day I made this I just wrote it all in to get the effect. I decided I don't really mind leaving it this way because then I can switch things out if they prove to be unnecessary. Also, I'm trying to find a good goat stamp to use at the top.

And here is the finished product.

A little sad it was not a surprise but like I said it was very helpful that he was around for laying the adhesive contact paper down.