Guest Blogger: DIY Framed 'To Do' List

I am delighted to introduce you to our guest blogger, Stephanie.  Laila and I are both thrilled to have her writing with us this week.

Stephanie Muhr is a contemporary child and family photographer who resides in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, where she homeschools her four children. You can check out her work on her website Shoestring Photography and show her some love by 'liking' her Facebook Page.

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As a busy mom I find it difficult to keep on track with my domestic and business responsibilities.  Keeping lists help me remember the many goals, tasks, and appointments I have each day. A down side to my many to do lists is the mass amounts of paper I go through and it's not just me - all my kids have individual lists that we print off each week. While trying to figure out how to save the forest of trees that my family must be consuming, I discovered a fun little project for kids and adults to save paper - a homemade "chore chart" or "to do list". This project combined my kids distinctive personalities and specific duties that they are responsible for each day.

Here's how we did it:

#1 - Gather all the supplies you may need to do your chart. I found most of my items at home or at the dollar store. Pens, markers, glue, dry erase markers, picture frame (I chose 8x10), paper, scissors, and photos or other images.

#2 Cut a piece of paper to fit into your frame. Embelish with recycled cards, photos, kids drawings, ect. Hand write or print out and glue a list of your daily to do's.

My older kids used an editing program to arrange images they found online of their current favorite things and typed up their lists. We chose to clump a series of chores together to avoid returning to the chart every five minutes to cross off each individual item. We then sent the finished image to our local photo lab and had it printed in the correct size to fit our frames.

#3 Frame your masterpiece. Now that your list is under glass you can cross off your chores throughout the day and erase at the end so you can do it all again tomorrow!

All my kids enjoy their personalized charts and can't wait to cross off their acccomplishments each day. As for myself I ended up using a large (almost poster sized) frame and did not include a list of to do's. Since my list changes sometimes by the minute I left plenty of room to write my to do's with my dry erase markers as they come up. Variations of this project include framing a blank or lined piece of paper to practice drawing or handwriting and framing a map to cross off bike paths or parks that you have visited. We have found the blank paper frames to be very handy on road trips to keep little hands occupied and the lined paper frames very usefull in keeping frustrations low when mistakes are made - just erase and start over!

*All photographs courtesy Stephanie Muhr.*

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I love Steph's idea so much - I cannot wait to do make these with our kids this summer!  We would all love to see the creations you come up with, so don't be shy - head on over to our Facebook Page and post the photo of your framed 'to do' list.

If you are interested in guest blogging at Significantly Simple, please email us at significantlysimple at gmail dot com.