Giant Kids Growth Chart Ruler

Happy Friday everyone {TGIF}! This is Elyse from Six Sister's Stuff.
Today we wanted to share a cute idea we had to measure your growing kids!
My husband just graduated, so we have spent the last few years moving around from apartment to apartment. Since we were moving so much, I thought that I could make some thing a little more portable to mark my little guy's height until we get settled in a home! I found a growth ruler at Pottery Barn Kids and used that for a little inspiration.

Our inspiration....
I don't think I would ever pay $58 for this. :)

Here is how I made mine:

This wood is about 10" x 72" and I got it at Home Depot for $8.44! Not bad!

I used a "natural" shade of stain and stained the wood. The stain was $4.50 at WalMart.

Then I used a measuring tape to mark every inch so I knew where I would want lines painted.

I decided to make some stencils of short and long lines I wanted on my ruler and that was a HORRIBLE idea {hence the black & white picture}! Don't do that! The paint seeps through!

So my cute husband told me to use masking tape and mark off where I wanted to paint. I would do a line at every inch and would do two 2" lines, then one 3" line for the markings on my ruler. Used a lot of tape!

Then I painted over the tape/lines with black acrylic paint

I peeled the tape off and luckily it worked! :) What a relief! Then I printed out some numbers onto some paper that has adhesive on the back, cut the numbers out and used the leftovers as a stencil. I painted over those and took the sticker paper off. I used distress ink on the edges and did one more coat of stain.

I started my lines 3 inches off so that I could always hang this 3 inches off the ground, rather than just propping it against the wall. So now my ruler will measure up to 6'3". I decided to pin up a picture of him at each age we measure him at and write his height next to it.
Our grand total came to $12.94! We can handle that! :)

Have a fabulous weekend!