Paint Chip Dry Erase Calendar - MakerCraft Live!

Our finished calendar, from a few months ago, along with the supplies for our new calendar

Hey makers! We held our very first Facebook live yesterday, and gave a tutorial on how to make a a dry erase calendar with paint chips. For everyone who missed it, you can watch the whole video (it's a little less than 30 minutes) here: Paint Chip Dry Erase Calendar. But we wanted to give a written version of the instructions as well!

For this project, you'll need

• A 16x20 inch poster frame
• 35 paint chips (larger, single-color paint chips are preferred)
• A marking pencil
• A long straight-edge ruler (or any ruler, plus one long straight edge)
• Glue or double-sided tape (we used double-sided crafting tape)

The first thing you'll want to do is cut each paint chip into 2-inch squares. This part takes the longest to do, so don't get discouraged! When you're done, you should be able to lay them out in a 5 x 7 grid. You can decide now which order you want the colors to be in, and make a note of the order on the back of each paint chip so you don't get them mixed up.

Each poster frame comes with a filler paper, which has all the product information on it. You're going to take this and flip it over, so you'e got the blank white side showing. Turn the paper so it's landscape (long ways going side to side, not up and down). From the top left corner, make a light mark down 2.25 inches. This is going to be the top of your calendar, where you'll write the month.

From that mark, go down another 2.5 inches and make another mark. Continue this all the way down the side of the calendar (you should end up with 6 marks in total).

Then from the bottom left corner, make a mark 2.25 inches to the right. Continue this all along the bottom edge (you should end up with 8 marks). Each of these marks will tell us where to put the rows and columns of our calendar.

Use your ruler or straight edge to draw a very faint line at each mark, all the way across to the opposite side of the page. Try to make this line easy enough to see up close, but harder to see from a distance. You will be erasing this later!

If you look closely, you may be able to see very faint lines.

If your ruler isn't large enough to go across the entire length of the paper, move your ruler carefully between marks. You will want to get these lines as straight as possible, at a perfect right angle from the left or bottom sides.

When you're done marking your lines, you should have a grid that's at least 6 x 8 (with some excess space). The first row and column you're going to leave blank, so starting from the second box in, second box down, you'll place your first paint chip square (if you want to lay these out first, to get a sense of what the calendar will look like, feel free!).

The paint chips are going to go in the bottom left corner of each square in the grid. You can use liquid glue, hot glue, or (like we did) double-sided tape to attach your paint chips. Try to keep them as neat as possible!

You'll place seven paint chips down in a row, then move down to the next row and place seven more, until you have all 35 paint chips attached to the white paper.

Now, all you have to do is put the white paper back between the plastic protective sheet and the cardboard backing, and re-attach the frame sides. Ta-dah! Your calendar is done! Write the name of the month in the blank space on top, and write down the days in each square if you like!

If you use our tutorial to make your own paint chip calendar, please take pictures and send them to us! We're always excited to hear what our makers are up to, and we might even feature you on our social media pages!

Thank you to everyone who tuned into our very first Facebook Live - we'll be doing more in the coming weeks, so if there's anything specific you want to see please let us know!