Dictionary Page Tray

Since I homeschool I am always trying to find ways to keep all our school stuff organized. We use several workbooks everyday and so I wanted to find a way to corral them together and make it easy for my little one to grab everything when it was time for school. Here's what I came up with!


And this is what I started with ...


Pretty yucky huh? But it was only $1.50 and it's not tin or thin plastic so it's super sturdy! This was definitely a trial and error project! At first I had the brilliant idea of using chalkboard paint so we could write on it - long story short that didn't pan out, so I was ready to abandon the tray and take it back to DI when I decided to cover it with dictionary pages! Here's what I did:

1) Attempt to paint the tray with chalkboard paint - move on to next idea but leave the paint on!
2) Cut dictionary pages into squares and rectangles and modge podge them on (a while back I found a super thick older dictionary at DI for $3!)
3) Cut out "we love school" with my cricut and modge podge that on
4) paint the outside of the tray

And that's it! Easy peasy!

I am the WORST painter (probably why the chalkboard paint didn't work out) so I definitely need to clean up the outer edges a bit, but all in all I think this turned out great! I love the way the bright teal pops! What do you think??

I'm linking up to the same great blogs I always do (see last post :)