measuring day. and how we made our measuring day plank.

maybe a week ago, james and i were talking about how tall alice is now and how we should start measuring her on the wall, but we (hopefully) wont live in our current apartment for very long so wed need to make something. then i remembered that i had pinned this project a few weeks ago when i was trying to figure out a legitimate use for pinterest (i am using it a bit more now, but im still not entirely sold on it), so i told james about it and we decided we would make our own. 

i was really excited about this project, because weve spent a lot of time lately talking about how we REALLY need to work on making our apartment more homey and more "us", and also because our lack of space has kept us from doing projects of any sort (something both of us LOVE to do). 

according to the other tutorial, this looked like a really cheap and quick project, i mean, get a cheap plank of wood, stain it, draw some likes with sharpie and DONE (i mean, she did it with a baby in a bjorn) . so we got started (note: this isnt really a tutorial in the traditional sense, its more just what we did):

now james and i didnt talk much about what we needed to get and he went to buy the wood and stain without me, so instead of buying a cheap plank, he bought a more expensive nice looking piece, which he sanded it and and added a nice little decorative edge (sometimes being married to a carpenter is nice):

then i sketched out how i wanted the lines and numbers to go (i wasnt super into the ruler motif of the other one):

next i measured out all the lines and traced them in pencil:

as well as the numbers (i wanted handwritten rather than vinyl numbers or a traced font):

i started drawing the lines with sharpie, and it looked like crap, so james suggested that we do tape stencils and tape, since thats what he does at work (he builds basketball courts):

and it looked much better than the sharpie: 

i wanted a heavier line weight for the "foot" lines, so we made separate stencils for those:

then i painted the numbers, but i didnt have the appropriate paintbrush, so they came out kind of lame and i had to remind myself that this was going on a wall and nobody was going to be inspecting it: 

then james did the stain:

and when the stain was dry, i touched up some of the numbers with a better marker that james found, and then we hung it up:

and then it was time for measuring day! just like that one episode of angry beavers! 

so this project wasnt as cheap or fast or easy as i had anticipated , but im SO happy with how it came out.