DIY Sandpaper Numbers

I decided to make a set of sandpaper numbers for my two year old. When my older child was using the sandpaper numbers, we made them out of notecards and glitter glue. They served their purpose, but I wanted to make something more lasting this time around.

The cost to make these wass negligible, as the only item I had to buy was an eighteen inch square of balsa wood from the craft store (and I used a 40% off coupon so it was less than $2). I already had dark green spray paint and extra sandpaper lying around the garage.

Cut the wood into rectangles about 3''x4'' and sand them.

Apply one coat of spray paint and then sand again.

Apply the second coat of spray paint.

Trace and cut out numbers from the sandpaper. I used a font called MontessoriScript that I found here. I made it bold and increased the size to fit my cards.

Use glue or Modge Podge to stick the sandpaper numbers to the wood.

I'm pretty excited about how these turned out. I'm hoping they get a lot of use.

DIY Media Center

So we finally decided to upgrade some of our furniture. Ikea, we still love you, but you remind us of our college dorm rooms. We wanted to start in our main living room because it is really the centerpiece of our home. Our dream would be to purchase the Pottery Barn Printer's Media Cabinet, but let's face it....$1100 dollars, when you have two destructive children and a dog who doesn't realize quite how big she is, is too much to spend (the entire set would be closer to $4000)!

Luckily, other people have also faced this dilemma. We found some plans on Ana White's blog and decided to give it a go. This was our first attempt at furniture building.

We deviated from the plans with regards to measurement. For the boxes and the shelves we used birth ply. The doors and the trim pieces are pine. The overall length of the cabinet is 64", just like her plans. Instead of four individually constructed bases like Ana's and Pottery Barn we made one large unit with three sections. We found that if we did four sections, then our stereo/blue ray/cable box would not fit!

Finishing the cabinet was the most difficult part. If anyone says staining is easy...well, they were probably using nicer wood than birch ply! We tried to use Minwax, but we just could not get a deep rich color even after three coats. I went to our local Woodcraft store for help, and I have to recommend Woodcraft of Denver very highly. The employees were so helpful and patient with me! I showed them a picture of the Pottery Barn cabinet and they helped me to find a similarly rich color. We used Minwax water-based wood conditioner followed by two coats of General Finishes Black Cherry water-based stain. We then topped it with three coats of General Finishes gloss polyurethane, sanding after each coat.


It was very difficult to get the color even, but we did get better with practice. We live in a very dry climate and were finding that the stain was drying much faster than the can said it would. We ended up using a "wax on wax off" tactic to avoid streaking and botching. Luckily, we started with the inside of the cabinets which are not visible!

I think this cabinet turned out absolutely fantastic. Our eventual goal is to make matching bookshelves for each side as well as a hutch for the top. The total time investment for this cabinet was approximately 40 hours and the total cost was $220 plus about $50 in tools that we didn't already have (the kreg jig).

Ducky Diaper Cake

A close friend of ours is getting ready to have a baby and I had a chance to make the diaper cake for her shower. The shower theme was ponds and ducks. I found this great little inflatable ducky on Amazon and used it as the base of the cake.

I didn't feel like making the standard round diaper cake because I'm not patient enough to wind a million rubber bands. I found this tutorial for making a square diaper cake and modified it to fit onto the duck. I used two Costco-sized boxes of size 1 Huggies...so a lot of diapers! I think it was approximately double the number the tutorial used.

My husband cut a piece of wood and screwed a dowel rod to it. This went through the four layers of the "cake" to hold the whole thing upright. It was a really nifty and easy solution.

The coordinating ribbons are just glued around the diapers (not to the diapers), they are just there to cover the rubber bands. The horizontal ribbons hold each layer of the cake together.

I picked up a few bath-themed items to tie to the cake along with a hooded towel for the duck.

This turned out great and only took a few hours to put together.

Seed and Plant Matching

I made this great work tonight. I can't wait to show the girls in the morning! Montessori Print Shop has a number of completely free printables. I downloaded the nomenclature cards for seed and plant matching twice. I mounted them on bright yellow card stock and laminated them. They turned out beautifully, if I do say so myself!

I also used a pattern from Montessori Print Shop, here, for making a folder for my nomenclature cards. I think it turned out great as well. I don't think I'd use it for a classroom because I don't think it would last, but for our home, it's perfect!

Then, for an added task, I found most of the matching seeds (I have a massive number of seeds saved...for what? I'm not sure...). I'm going to place some plain white squares of paper in the tray and have my older daughter create a seed book by writing the names of the plants, drawing the plants and pasting the matching seeds on the page.

DIY Montessori Felt Parts of a Tree

The girls really love them some science! I would love to purchase all of the botany puzzles and cards, but unfortunately as a homeschool family I not only can't afford them, but I also don't really have the space to store the entire set of materials. I decided to make a felt tree to stand in for the parts of a tree puzzle.

The quality of these drawings is pretty low, but I thought someone else might benefit from having the pattern ready to print. Perhaps someday when I have lots of spare time I will make higher quality patterns. I will also try to add other simple patterns as we go along. The pattern can be found here:

• Parts of a Tree Pattern

Please link to this page!

DIY Montessori Pink Tower

The pink tower is such a classic montessori material that I knew we had to have it for homeschooling. It and the brown stairs were my older daughter's favorite "work" for the better part of a semester and I'm sure her sister will love it too.  We already had a set of the cardboard nesting blocks, and those are great, but they lack the weight and flexibility of the pink tower.

My husband made these for us on a Saturday afternoon. He used a scrap 4x4 that we had left over from building our house. The pink tower is made up of ascending cubes, 1cm x 1cm x 1cm up to 10cm x 10cm x 10cm. He used a combination of the table saw and the mitre saw to cut them to the right size and then sanded them.

The hardest part of this is cutting and sanding the 1 cm and 2 cm blocks. They are so tiny!

Our 'pink' tower is still the natural wood color. I think we will paint it someday, but I really like the way the raw wood looks.

Our next project will be to make the brown stairs.

DIY Montessori Color Tablets

The color tablets are one of those materials that children use for only a short time between the ages of two and three. My two year old doesn't yet know her colors so I made her a set to help with that learning.

These tablets are made from balsa wood cut to 2 inches x 1.5 inches. The hardest part was cutting the balsa wood. I read somewhere that you can just score it and snap it, but that certainly didn't work for me. I ended up having my husband cut and sand them with his table saw and mitre saw. It took him about 30 minutes and I didn't cut any fingers off. 

Once I had the tablets cut I used Modge Podge to attach some paint chips that I picked up at the hardware store. I've never used Modge Podge, and it was a little tricky to make it look right. If I applied it to the paint chip, it didn't stick to the wood. I found that using a foam brush to apply it directly to the wood was the best option. I used a cloth to smoosh the paint chip down evenly. I was still seeing the edges pull up a bit so I just stacked the tablets and put a heavy book on top of them until they were dry.

Here's an image of the completed color tablets (set 1). I didn't make the entire set of color tablets because I don't think that is necessary in a homeschool environment. I just made enough for the first and second set of twenty two tablets (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, white, grey, and pink).

The total cost of this project was about $4 for the balsa wood. The total time for this project was about 2 hours.

DIY Roof-Mount Cargo Box Lift

My husband is a storage fanatic, he has a system for everything. We recently purchased a Yakima SkyBox 16S to go on top of our Jeep Cherokee. It's a great product, but it's huge and a little difficult to store.  Another cargo box manufacturer makes a cargo box lift, but with a price tag of $150+ it's not really accessible for the consumer on a budget. Enter my husband...

To begin, we needed to find an affordable pulley system. The parts to make a pulley system are readily available at most hardware stores, but we did some searching and found a  Ceiling-Mount Bike Lift at The Container Store that wasn't too expensive. 

Follow the instructions in the box to mount the bike lift to the ceiling (the one downside is that you do have to have high ceilings. We mounted our box directly over the parking space for the Jeep, this allows us to raise and lower the box directly onto the roof of the car. It's fantastic!

The bike lift can almost be used by itself to hang the cargo box, but we noticed that the plastic was bending on one side of the box. We didn't want to damage the cargo box so we decided to make some straps to hang it with. 

To make the straps, we used some inexpensive utility straps from the hardware store. We measured two, one strap for the front of the box and one strap for the rear of the box. Both straps should sit in front of the clamps that attach the cargo box to the rack. Wrap the straps around the box and leave enough material to make a loop on each side to fit over the hooks in the pulley system. Remove the remaining strapping material.

Sew the loops. I'm not much of a seamstress, so I copied the stitching pattern that was used by the manufacturer of the straps. It seems pretty sturdy.



Voila! Loop your straps under the cargo box, and attach to the pulley system. You may need to balance it out while it's going up because it tends to tilt a bit.








***Note: Do this at your own risk, I don't want to get sued if you do something silly and drop it on your car or your head.