Classroom door decor - Do you want to build a snowman?

It is almost Christmas and a few days ago the teacher next to me decided to decorate her door with inspiration from the movie Elf. After seeing all the buzz her door was getting, the snowflake I had hanging in the window of my door just looked sad. 

* Please excuse the photo quality. This is what happens when you come in on a Saturday when only the emergency lights are on to decorate your door. 

So what did I do? I took to Pinterest to get Pinspired of course!

Here is the original Pinspiration for my door decor. Thanks to Mrs. S in room 210 for the decorating idea. Once I was Pinspired, then I needed to figure out how to make it my own (and how to make it).

Now for the plan. How would I execute it? How in the world would I make my snowflakes look as cute as these (because let's face it, paper snowflakes usually just turn out awkward looking)? How would I make this my own? 

Step number 1 - Make some snowflakes. How? Thanks to Google I found a tutorial to make these awesome snowflakes. 

Step number 2 - Get all the pieces ready (including Olaf, snowball cut outs that my awesome aide helped me prepare, and the snowflakes.)

** Yes, I cheated and traced Olaf. If I had tried to free hand him, it would have been a disaster.

Step number 3 - Cut out all the pieces and make sure they match and look decent. 

Step number 4 - Glue Olaf's eyes, eyebrows, mouth, and buttons to his body. 

Step number 5 - Cover the door in roll paper for the background (after of course, cutting it to the correct size - which I did not take a picture of, but took a little more time than planned).

Step number 6 - Time to have a snowball fight... or cover the bottom of the door in snowballs. 

Step number 7 - It's OLAF time!!!!!! 

Step number 8 - His nose looked a little too small, so I made a new one that worked with the size of his face better. Here is a more proportional Olaf. 

Step number 9 - Add the snowflakes. My snowflakes are a combination of handmade and die-cuts in 3 shades of blue and white. I like the variety and they add a nice pop to the door. 

Step number 10 - Olaf was still missing something - his HAIR! Brown pipe cleaners to the rescue and Olaf has his signature do on the top of his head. 

Step number 11 (final step) - What words could I add to the door? Some that are certain to start an earworm, of course! 

*** Yes, I know the "d" should be capitalized, but our die-cut machine is either all caps in one font or all lowercase in this font. The combination doesn't look good and the all caps is not as cute of a font. 

Thanks to my aides for helping me prep the snowballs and snowflakes on Friday, one of my fellow special ed teachers for helping me put it all together, and of course Pinterest and Google for helping with the idea and snowflake demo. Four hours on a Saturday afternoon later and I can't wait to see what my students and coworkers have to say when they see it on Monday!

This Pinspired idea definitely turned out to be a treat!

Why the blog?

Let's face it. Pinterest is one of the best things that has happened for lesson planning, DIYing, and recipe trying in the technology age. As a teacher, theoretical crafter (my ideas are usually bigger than my talent), and a semi-skilled person in the kitchen, I do not know what I would do WITHOUT Pinterest. But, let's face it. When we try to get Pinspired, sometimes our plans are better than our final product. This blog will show most of Pinspired ideas. My hope is that most will be treats (or things that actually turn out), but I am sure that there will still be some tricks (also known as Pinterest fails).