Menu Board

Ah, winter. This past week many areas in the US were hit with a pretty big winter storm. I haven’t seen cold weather in Texas like this that I can recall in my lifetime. Our streets were iced over for four days and as a result, our schools were shut down. Many businesses were closed as well. We get maybe one or two significant ice storms every year and so the area is not equipped to remove ice from the roads in an efficient manner. On Monday, my Facebook feed seemed to have two main themes: the posts were either about the grocery stores being packed with people preparing for the cold weather that was coming, or poking fun at those planners who were out shopping for groceries.

I admit, I purchased our groceries for the week on Monday. However, the impending winter storm had little to do with our shopping trip. We went because I plan out our meals on a weekly basis and Monday is our grocery shopping day. We go early in the morning to avoid the crowds and because my two small children are at their best immediately post-breakfast so we’re most likely to have a successful, quick, and even pleasant shopping trip if we go at that time of day. Let me tell you how very thankful I am that I plan out our meals a week ahead of time – while many of my friends on Facebook were posting on Thursday about having to get very creative for their meals because they couldn’t get to the grocery store to buy food, we had all of our ingredients ready to go for the meals I had planned. It was a huge stress relief not to have to worry about running to the store to throw something together for dinner, or trying to make pasta surprise out of random pantry and freezer items.

Today I’m going to show you how you can easily create a pretty, reusable menu board to make your weekly meal planning more fun. I love using my menu board and my husband likes being able to look at it and know what is for dinner without having to ask, “What’s for dinner?”

Supplies:

8×10 frame with glass and an easel back
Studio 365 Creative Weekly Planners by Mari Koegelenberg
Cafe Latte digital scrapbook kit by Sugarplum Paperie & Tracie Stroud
Epson Premium Matte Photo Paper
Fiskars Paper Trimmer
dry erase marker

I used my photo editing program (I work with Photoshop CS5), to create a new document that is 8 inches wide x 10 inches high and 300 pixels/inch.

I added the weekly grid png file to my document and adjusted the size until I got it like I wanted it. I wanted to add a shopping list as well, so I used the png file that had the “To do” list on the right hand side.

To make sure my grid was centered, I added guide lines by going to View > New Guide and entering “4 in” with vertical orientation and then “5 in” with horizontal orientation. I also made sure my View > Snap was selected and the View > Snap To settings were set to “Guides” so that my image would snap to the center where the guide lines cross.

Next I created a couple of clipping masks by using the magic wand tool (keyboard shortcut W) and with the grid layer selected I clicked on the outside of the outermost border. I created a new layer and then I selected the paint bucket (keyboard shortcut G). I filled the selected area with paint.

While on the layer I just created, I used the magic wand tool to select the middle area. I created another new layer and filled this area with paint.

Next I added a couple of papers from the Cafe Latte kit and clipped them to the masks I had created. Then I added a few elements from the kit and applied drop shadows to the elements.

Because I wanted a shopping list, I took the eraser and removed the “To Do” words from the grid layer and then added “Shopping List” in their place. I also added “Weekly Meal Plan.”

Finally, I linked all of my layers, opened a new canvas that was 8.5″ x 11″ and dragged the entire thing to the new document. I printed it out, cut it down to size, and put it into my frame. Then I took my dry erase marker, added the date and planned out next week’s meals! Voila! You have a reusable menu planner that didn’t even require adhesive to create!

Menu Board

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