Recently Matt and I had some friends over and made some good, but sort of unusual foods. Since I didn’t have enough time to tell everyone what things were, some people hesitated to try things. Enough of that! I want people to eat my yummy food. So after that night I decided I must make some of those cute little chalkboard clips floating around on pinterest, and then my guests will always know what food is there! There are many of these clips out there; this is one example from Happy Clippings.

I wanted to make these as easy as possible, so the next day I set out to find tiny little chalkboards; I know they used to exist because we did crafts with them when I was a kid in Girl Scouts. But I couldn’t find them… and I didn’t want to paint them because I was too lazy for that. When I asked a person at Michael’s, he suggested I use these chalkboard stickers that they had in the floral department. They were perfect and cute!

My materials:

• Clothespins
• Chalkboard stickers
• Little tiny wood boards that were the same size as the chalkboard stickers
• Sandpaper
• Wood glue
• Chalk (mine came with my chalkboard stickers)

Assembly:

• Do a little bit of sanding on the wood boards if they are rough.
• Put the chalkboard stickers on the wood boards. This was so easy and took no time at all. After all, they were just stickers!
• Glue the (now) chalkboards to the clothespins!
• Clamp the clothespin and the chalkboard together with an extra clothespin. (It says on the wood glue to clamp the items together that you are gluing, and what’s more convenient than the pile of clothespins you have next to you?)
• Let them sit for a few hours like that.
• Then, you’re done! Easy!!

I also wrote our last name on the back of my clips – that way when we go places people can know who the dish belongs to, and who made the delicious food!!

This project was so easy and so cute! And I’ve already used my clips once! Matt took some extra pumpkin cranberry bread into his work this week and we put one of my clips on the bowl. Perfect!

Some other ideas and tips:

• The wood and clothespins could be painted or decorated with scrapbook paper for different seasons or holidays or just if you don’t want the bare wood look!
• Michael’s had a couple of different shapes of these chalkboard stickers – different shapes could make cute clips too!
• A suggestion my mother in law had was to use a chalk pencil instead of a piece of chalk to do the writing on the boards. This was genius! I found a “dressmakers pencil” at Joann’s and it works like a charm. Much neater writing on the boards, and no chalk on your hands afterwards!

Here is one of my clips on some delicious guacamole hummus. The clips are so cute! I can’t wait for all the parties and potlucks where I can use them and show them off!