Craft A Spell: Summer Lovin': DeDe's Driveway Chalk Twister

Next up in the Summer Lovin' series is my bloggy friend DeDe who blogs over at Designed Decor. DeDe's blog is all about handmade, decorating, and just plain life - a motto that I love. We met through One Artsy Mama's blog mentoring program.

Here she is!

I came across an idea on Pinterest to make your own twister game. Thanks to Fun Family Crafts for the idea. I wanted to make this an inexpensive D.I.Y. project. I did not have the spray paint needed to do this in the grass, so I decided to use sidewalk chalk and make the game in the driveway.

I had the foam core board left over from the graduation candy dishes I made a few days before the party,so I used this to make my spinner board. I first traced out the design with pencil, and then applied the darker permanent line with a silver sharpie pen.

I found the hand and foot graphics on the internet, and printed them to the size I needed for the twister spinner board.

I than decided to use the same chalk colors on the board that I used in the driveway.

I thought the colors turned out great on the black foam board. Than it dawned on me that when people spin the spinner, the chalk will come off the board or smear all over the place. So now I am wondering how to seal the chalk to the board? So this is where things turned into a bigger project than anticipated. This is the part that most D.I.Y.er's will leave out of their post, but I wanted to include it so we all can learn from another D.I.Y.er's mistakes. I decided to seal the board with clear spray acrylic sealer. Here is my result.

I thought it looked cool, but would not work for the twister spinner board. I then decided that I would have to paint on the colors. I was so happy to discover I had all the colors needed in my basement. Remember I wanted to do an inexpensive D.I.Y. project. So here is the board after being painted. This took more time than I had anticipated.

The only piece that I had to buy was the spinner. I found this finger wood piece for .20 cents. I drilled a hole into the balancing point of the finger, and used this screw and other piece (no clue what it is called) to anchor the spinner.

Here is the finished board.

Turned out better than expected, even with my little disaster set back. I think all good D.I.Y.er's have set backs and the main thing is that we learn from our own or someone else's set backs. The morning of the Graduation party I had my boys color in the chalk circles.

If the kids are doing the filling in of the circles, tell them to go light on the chalk. My oldest son wanted every nook and cranny of the driveway to be filled in. This just created a lot of chalk dust in the circle. Oh and tell them not to blow off the extra, it just spreads all over the driveway. Here is some of the fun and laughter we had watching and playing the game.