The Clipboards

The image is not as clear as I would have liked, but...these are the clipboards I made for Maggie's and Emma's teachers as "end-of-the-year" gifts.

I really like black, white and red together. I found these black and white papers at Michael's in a pad called "color basics" by Me and My Big Ideas. They also have a pad of red and white. I cut the butterflies with my Indie Art cartridge, layering the colored paper over red.. The letters spelling out the names are from Base Camp. I found a cute quote from Phyllis Diller to add to the top of the clipboard - "We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and be quiet". I thought that would be appropriate to give to a teacher, since she must spend a lot of her day telling the kids to sit down and be quiet.

I glued a 1/2 inch strip of red paper where the two black and whites meet, simply because I love to add red to black and white. I cut 6 lengths of black, red and white ribbon and tied them to the clip, just for pretty.

When I saw this clipboard being demonstrated on tv, the lady made it look so simple. She said to get a clipboard with a removable clip. That's hard to find. I finally found them at Michael's. The clip has two little screws with washers at the back. They were very easy to remove. They were NOT easy to get back on! It's almost a two-person ordeal.

What she didn't say was that the clip has a very tight spring to keep it closed. Yes, to keep it closed. You can't put it back on when it's closed! Yikes! And the screws are very short! They barely poke out the back where the washers are supposed to screw on. I had to keep a good grip on the clip, keeping it open so it would lie flat enough for the short screws to go in far enough that the washers could go on.

How many times do you think the little screw when flying off into who-knows-where, or the little washer would slip from my sweaty hands and land somewhere under the table? How many times do you think that clip would snap shut, almost severing my fingers? I tried jamming something under the clip to keep it open, only to have it slip out, time and time again. How many times do you think I almost gave up?