Felt and Contact Paper

I shared these pictures with you on my last post, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail (since I was getting a lot of emails and questions about them!)  So here we go!

Years ago (my second year of teaching actually), I was a rover in a year round school.  Now, for those of you unfamiliar with what a rover is, basically I was the teacher in the triad of teachers who moved from classroom to classroom when the other tracks were off. Since I moved back and forth (every month!), I didn't have a permanent home.  No permanent home means that I really didn't have the ability to do my own bulletin boards.  I was stuck using what the off track teacher had chosen to put up in her room.

Now, if you know anything about me by now it is that I *need* to make my room look my "style".  It is part of my teaching DNA.  So not having control over the bulletin boards was HORRIBLE for me....and I simply couldn't take it.  To remedy this situation, I enlisted the help of my mother and we made roving boards out of felt to go right over top of the other boards.  They were FABULOUS!  I loved them....and I used them the following year when I wasn't even roving!

Then, I moved classroom sections and the boards didn't fit...so I stopped using them.  But last year, my teaching partner Kristi reignited my love of felt when she put it on her boards and I knew I needed the felt in my room this year.

I went to Joann's (which has a teacher discount program of 15% off!!  Whoo hoo!!  Click here for more details) and bought 10 yards of felt.  Then I moved on and bought 5 rolls of striped ribbon (all different colors...which is a DRASTIC departure for me!)

Putting felt up is super easy and it looks SO nice when it is done.  Here are my results:

The felt was really easy to put up.  I just used push pins to pull the fabric taught and then stapled with my regular stapler. The ribbon shows the staples a little bit too much, so if you are going to go that route, be sure to use as few staples as possible to keep the ribbon up.

When I was done, I had a ton of remnants left over.  I knew what I had to do with them.  I saw this pin on Pinterest and immediately got to removing the gosh awful tennis balls off the bottoms of my chairs and started rubber banding the felt on instead.  I used a 2" by 2" square and it covered the bottoms just fine. (though that was not super strict...I just sort of cut squares that I thought would work)  I attached the felt squares with rubber bands and they are good to go!  It took me a total of about 30 mins to do this entire process.



Still, I was left with pieces.  I cut them up and they are now a class set of whiteboard erasers!

I then went about covering my new small group table with black contact paper.  I think it looks nicer than the old grey table I had! This didn't take too long, but I did have to go a bit slowly to get the bubbles out.  The final step was to take these Brewster Wall Pops WPE93881 Peel & Stick Flirt Dry-Erase Dots with Marker, 3-Count I bought at Office Depot and stick them down. If you click on the link above though, it will take you to Amazon, and they have a ton of different colors to choose from.   My ottomans from Walmart (that I bought 3 years ago) are my chairs and I have a nice little small group area to work in!

And that is about it for what I have made this past week.  I am literally the slowest person on the planet right now (which is SUPER UNUSUAL for me...I am usually quite fast when it comes to getting things done.)  Hopefully next week I will get a bit more done!  :)