Score Board

Ryan's room was pretty bare and in desperate need of some decor so I decided I needed to come up with something for the walls. I love the scoreboard from this PBK picture shown below and decided I wanted to make my own.

I ended up using a thin plywood board that I had in the garage left over from a previous project. I had some chalk paint also left over from the chalk board I made for Sarah's room. Once painted, I rubbed the board with white chalk which helped bring out the board's imperfections and tone down the black paint. I didn't have any intentions of using it as a chalk board, but I do think it would also look cute if you used chalk to take score. Initially I used painters tape to get clean painted lines around the edge, but  because this is cheap plywood when I pulled off the tape it started to pull up thin pieces of the wood with it. So for the remainder I just painted by filling in lines I had traced.

I then made stencils for the letter and numbers out of paper using the same technique I used when painting Ryan's dresser numbers found here. If you've never stenciled, I'll talk about that more in a minute.

Here it is once I finished painting/stenciling it:

I then bought these steel upholstery tacks at Joann's to hold the score cards.

 I hammered one under each inning number.

Here is a close-up on how these nail heads are shaped, perfectly imperfect.

Once those were done, I was ready for these wooden squares that I found at Hobby Lobby.

I drilled a hole so that I could hang the score cards with twine.

I then painted them with some acrylic paint. 

I again traced my numbers onto paper and cut them out.

 

There are a lot of different stencil brushes that would work, this is just one that I had. I've also used just a balled up paper towel to do this which would work fine for such a small project. Dip your brush in the paint and dab off the excess.

 You want to dab it on instead of brushing it on, and just dab the paint until the number has been filled in. Carefully lift off the stencil and there you go.

I then glazed it using this stain diluted with water. I just used a paper towel to rub it on the card.

Once they dried I lightly sanded the numbers as well to help with the "aged" look.

Here is the completed scoreboard in the middle of the third inning.

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