Remember my experiment with the Martha Stewart Erasable Liquid chalk?

Yeah, not pretty.

And a while after I posted it, I got a comment from Brenda who said she had tried the product too, and when she tried to ‘erase’ it, she couldn’t get it off.  Yikes!  At the time, mine had been painted for about a month and I had not yet tried to erase it.  So I grabbed a damp paper towel and gave it a go.  She was right, it wouldn’t budge!  Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that using a magic eraser would do the trick.  Sure enough, it did.  So, if you have tried this product and want to remove it down the road, remember your magic eraser!

Since my Family and Friends stencil fit this chalkboard so perfectly, I still wanted to use it.  But this time I reverted to my tried and true Gioconda chalk pencil.

Mr. Q ordered mine from Amazon, but I think you can find these (or similar) at Michaels these days.

It took a little bit longer to fill in the entire stencil with the pencil, but it was worth it.

I used three different techniques for this.  The big letters at the top were outlined first with the pencil, then I added diagonal hash marks to fill them in.

With the next two lines of smaller print, I just used the sharp point of the pencil to fill in as best I could.  I went back after the stencil was removed and added some of the smaller lines that didn’t come through.

For the crown, I used the pencil to outline it, then shaded it in.

And for the branches at the bottom, I outlined them but did not shade them in.

And voila.  Much, much better, don’t you think?

Now that the weather is nice enough for working in my Carriage House workshop, and with my sale coming up in June, I’m really cranking out the projects.  So you may notice that I am posting more than usual.  I hope you don’t mind when I share so these with you.  I like to think there is some value in these posts aside from just a pitch for items that will be at my sale.  And for those of you that are local, I hope I’m enticing you to show up on June 11!