wooden growth chart diy

I have been wanting to make my own old and weathered looking growth chart ever since I came across this DIY on Pinterest a while back. I knew I wanted to find a board that had already been used and had some character and last week I found one!

I love the tutorial that I followed but made my own changes (making it quicker, which is much easier for my craft ADD), so I thought I would share my own process in case there is anyone else like me that needs to do quick crafts in order to keep interested. I need to appologize about the quality of some of the photos. I got lazy and used my phone for some of them, and a lot of the work was done in the pre-sun hours of the day (before Raeca wakes up so I can actually get some work done).

Here he is in his very blurry iPhone photo quality. Just a regular ole’ board with some old nail holes and some cool knots.

The best thing about the board? The price . . .  yeah that says 25 cents:

The first thing I did was stain my wood.

Then I used my Silhouette to cut out some chevron shapes onto white scrapbooking paper. I found the chevron through Google images and then traced it in Silhouette Studio. I sprayed a temporary adhesive to the back of all the chevron shapes except one. The one without the spray was used as my spacer. It was hard for me to remember in the early morning hours that the places where I put the paper would actually be wood in the end and the wood pieces were going to be white. I found it easiest to start at the top of my board and alternated the temporarily tacky paper with wooden spaces.

The board once I had all the papers down.

As I began to paint the papers started to curl a bit and some of the paint did bleed a bit. That was fine with me though because I was planning on sanding it and didn’t care if I had crisp lines. I waited a minute or two after painting my last chevron on before peeling off all the papers. Side note: If I had wanted lines that were crisp, I could have easily cut the chevron pieces out of contact paper or vinyl instead, that would have reduced most of the bleeding

I then used my Silhouette to cut out dashes and numbers 1 through 5. I sprayed the back of them again with my glue and while I was waiting a few minutes for the glue to dry (so it would temporarily adhere and not be permanent) I got out the measuring tape and measured where I wanted my foot markings. I started with the bottom of the board being at about 10 inches so I would have room to paint the one foot mark on. I started out by painting the dashes in black.

And then moved on to the numbers. I didn’t wait for the dashes to completely dry because I am impatient (remember crafting ADD), plus since I was going to sand it down I didn’t care if I peeled of some paint (although it didn’t peel off anyway).

After my chevrons, dashes and numbers were painted on this is what she looked like (hmm, interesting, the board started out as a he and has now progressed to a she, not sure why I am even subscribing a gender to a wooden board). You can see some of the parts where my white from the chevron bled through. No biggie, I fixed most of that in the next step.

And here she is all sanded down:

To attach the board to the wall I used mirror mounting tape that I found at Walmart.

I ended up using manila tags and regular ole’ gold thumbtacks to write her growth onto. I thought about using nails but since I put the chart up in Raeca’s room I didn’t want anything that she could bump into and get hurt with. The thumbtacks are flush to the wood so I don’t have to worry about that. Apparently I don’t have her height at one year written down, I’m going to have to check with the doctors office yet and see if they can give me that info.

If I would have bought new wood I probably would have bought something a little longer -this only goes up a little past 5 feet, which isn’t as tall as I would ideally like it.

I am having a table at a local craft show next month and have thought about making a few of these up, but I’m not sure if others would love it as much as I do. 🙂

I am excited to use this throughout the years!

You can check out more DIY’s here.

with love,
Chantel

Linking up here.