I've been meaning to make a height board for so long. Because I moved around so much growing up, I knew I didn't want to just mark our kids on the wall and not be able to take it with us. As I was brainstorming for the perfect one, I came across a bunch of cute ideas for growth charts: fabric ones, vinyl wall stickers, paper ones, and ones made on wooden planks. Check out Etsy for a huge selection of really creative ones. Here's what I came up with:
I was inspired by this one pictured below:
...but $120 was a little out of my price range. When Trent was making a Home Depot run awhile ago, I asked him to get me the cheapest wood board he could find and have it cut down to 7 feet.
I wanted my version to coordinate with some art I was making for the kids' room, and I had bought some scrapbook paper that had all these colors in it, so my palette was already defined.
I had gone so long without doing anything crafty and wanted to do one last project before the baby was born, so this was it and I loved how it turned out!
I measured off the board in 1 ft increments and traced on some numbers from a font that I had printed out.
(I did this by making improvised transfer paper: turn the paper over and color heavily with a pencil, then flip it back over, put it on the surface to transfer, then write over the number with a pencil again. Then, remove the paper and you'll see the pencil marks from the back have transferred over to the surface you wanted.)
Then I painted around the numbers with some craft paint (thank you for having an awesome sale, Michael's), measured the inch increments with a white paint pen (doing it in pencil first, of course), and brushed on some polycrylic to seal it. I was originally going to paint the numbers white, but Trent liked how the wood grain showed through, and I had to agree that it looked pretty cool that way.
Now we just have to find a good way to hang it, and we'll be all set. The kids approve; they measure themselves daily.
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