I Love My Front Porch Chalkboard

This is mostly a picture post. I just wanted to show you how fun it can be to have a chalkboard on your front porch - with a table in front of it to fill with all kinds of stuff.

I find designs for the chalkboard online (usually with the help of pinterest). Then I redraw them and adapt them to what I like and need.

Sorry about the crop on this. I am learning. And I am a slow learner.

I added snowmen and snowballs and scarves and mittens to the table for January. The ten-year olds from my church class thought I was talented to be able to copy the bear. Ten-year olds are so easy to fool.

Here is the chalkboard with the whole table thing going on.

If I were to give tips on how to write on a chalkboard they would be these:

• Draw up your design on a piece of paper - or print what you want from the internet.
• Draw on guidelines using a straight edge first - very lightly. Remember the blue striped paper from elementary school? Do those lines. Remember you will have ascenders and descenders on letters like y and g and l and b. Leave room for them. 
• Count how many letters and spaces in each line of letters. Start in the middle and work both directions if you want something centered. (example: willy nilly = 11 letters and spaces. The middle of the chalkboard, then, would have the space straddling it and I would write nilly normally out from the gap. Then I would write ylliw, in that order, writing from right to left leaving that center gap. Make sense?
• Write the words and drawings lightly at first. Start first with just writing them in normal handwriting. Then fill out the shape of the typography. (For instance, I first wrote D  A  Y in big block letters with lots of room between the letters. Then I filled out the larger shape of the serifs and bodies of the letters to DAY.)
• Use a damp cloth to erase what you don't love while it is still lightly drawn on.
• Get your chalk lightly wet and darken your lines and fill in the shapes. It will not look heavy as you use wet chalk but it will dry bright. Honest. And it will stay put better than dry chalk.
• Most important - remember that this is just an exercise in fun and whimsy. Enjoy it and its imperfections. It doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, if it is perfect you might as well just print it out on a computer. And that would just not be right.