Chalkboard Wall: Library Style

                                         

Do you know when you've just finished a display and see patrons walking by without even glancing at it? All of that work you've done, and nothing seems to stand out. Well, we have a wall of events that hadn't been doing well. You have to walk past it in order to get to our circulation desk, but even in that prime position people were glancing but not stopping to investigate.

After mulling it over for a couple of weeks, and doing some serious pinteresting, I brought the idea of a chalkboard wall to my director. Well she was all for it so away we went!

First, we bought chalkboard paint, paint rollers, and masking tape from our local Sherwin Williams. I had done some research before and quite a few reviews online said that the spray paint did not work as well as the can version, so we got the quarts for our project. The product we used was Krylon and below is a link to the amazon reviews:

Buy product here

If you want to make your own chalkboard paint, I've found an easy follow video for you:

Ok back to the paint we used. We read the directions on the back, which were easy to follow and quite informative, so I suggest doing that before moving on to paint anything.

Next we used a ruler to mark our dimensions on the wall. This is important before blocking out anything with tape, because if the tape is even a little bit crooked it shows and looks terrible! (I might have tried to eyeball it first so I'm speaking from experience) I just measured 6 inches in from every side and made a small mark with a pencil, then took a yardstick and periodically made marks to create a dotted line box. After that I lined the outside of the pencil marks with masking tape so that when I painted I covered them up.

Now when you paint, all of the instructions online said that rollers were a better tool then regular paint brushes because you want the wall to be a smooth as possible. This being said, I'm sure that if you used a brush your wall would still turn out fine. The wall we started out with was fairly smooth to begin with, so I didn't sand or even out the texture before painting. After a thin layer, we left it to dry overnight then I came in the next day to paint another layer, Over the weekend would be a prime time to complete this project.


Stop! This next part is soooo important I promise! Do NOT draw on your shiny new wall yet! you see, there's this weird little thing called "seasoning" that you should do first. you just take regular white chalk and cover the whole area you painted, then you take your hands and rub all over that so you make sure the chalk fill in the pores of the chalkboard paint. Because it is porous, if you don't season the wall first the original artwork you draw will imprint on the paint and you will see its outline forever.


After seasoning I just took a damp cloth and wiped the excess chalk off and voila! Chalkboard wall! You can hang papers using sticky tack, color with chalk or chalkboard markers. BUT be careful about the markers, and maybe try them on a corner first, because some have problems coming off the wall when you try to remove them.



Let me know what you think and if you have done anything like this! Have you used chalkboard markers? do you have any tips when removing them? I'll update you when we change our lettering and signs.

Bye for now!