Make your own MONOPOLY

It was my mom's 60th birthday, and we were planning to go on a family vacation. My sisters and I wanted to make her something special, and one of the many things that we produced for her birthday (T-shirts, private movie screening, photo album, a short clip etc..) we also decided to make her a costume monopoly board, featuring some of the milestones in her life.

I could not have done this without finding this amazing monopoly - photoshop template created by Brad, and without the help of my lovely, two older sisters.
Here's what you do:

Plan your board. decide what do you want to write in each square. Download the Photoshop files from Brad's site. Change the squares according to your plans, add photos or cartoons when necessary. create the property cards accordingly. Note that the board size is about 60x60cm, though you can always make it smaller.

Decorate the board with family photos. That's a matter of preference and taste. Just make sure you have some family photos on the computer, crop them as desired and add them to the board. Best is to use the "Extract" command in photoshop (under the filter menu).

Chance / Community chest- we changed that to surprise/ greeting. the thought was that the players will fill the cards with greetings for my mom and surprise gifts or tokens they wish to give her. we made some empty cards for that purpose.

Make the houses and hotels. we couldn't find any Monopoly hoses on stores and it was too late to buy some on ebay, so we made some. We bough 1x1cm wooden cubes. For the houses, we glued little roofs on them  made of a red paper stripe. For the hotels, we just glued two cubes together.  

Make the money. since it was our mom's birthday, we chose to make money with her face on it. We took a good profile picture of her, used the sketch filter in photoshop and placed her face in the center of a Monopoly bill. After I had that, I just changed the value of the bills. You can then print the bills on colored paper, and get some costumed Monopoly money. 

Make the players. we had a lot of ideas, but due to shortness of time we choose some figures out of the "toy a day" site. we made little heads of the family players and glued them on the folded toys.

 

We printed the board in a printing shop along with everything else, but if you have a colored printer you can print the things at home. We glued the board on some hard board carton to make it strong enough, and to make sure it doesn't wrinkle. We also made a box out of used carton.  

That's that. I can not say that it's not a lot of work, cause it is, but it made our mom so so happy, so I guess it was worth it.

Happy birthday mom!

DIY Toilet paper hanger tutorial

hey, what do you know: procrastination is a serious problem. hey, I even procrastinate the projects I start in order to procrastinate other things (and even procrastinated publishing this post. I have a serious problem)!
this project is something I've been "working" on for quite some time: finding new looks for our awesome toilet paper hanger, a brilliant thing by itself, shamelessly copied from my brilliant sister, Inbar.

the brilliant toilet paper hanger requires only two things: a string and a stick. both should both be durable and strong enough to hold the weight of several toilet paper rolls, one on top of the other.
the whole "improvement" idea started because after some time, the natural yarn that was holding our toilet papers tore and needed to be replaced. and then I thought, that hey- if I could protect the string the hole thing could last longer. and hey, if I'm covering up the string anyhow, i can use a stronger string to begin with.


I started by making some paper beads. there are endless tutorials around the web as how to make these; I like this tutorial, as her beads turned out so nice. when the beads dried i tried making the holes with a drill as mentioned in the tutorial- but then my genius dad suggested that I'll burn my way through, and by using a hot nail the thing took seconds.

my braking point was the painting: it took a me a long time finding the time and patience to paint these, and finding a place to let them dry.

eventually i made some holes in an empty energy bar box, that was a prefect drying stand.
I was not sure about putting some polish on the beads, but since our toilet is right next to the shower i thought it can only help preserve the beads longer.

as a last step i threaded the beads on a fishermen's string and tied the original stick at the end- this was I got the stronger version that maintained the natural look I like so much.To hang it, i made a loop at the top.

the brilliancy of this thing is its simplicity- and easy adjustments that can change its style to match different looking toilets. a clean look can be achieved by using some fishermen's string and an empty pen (transparent plastic), a more natural look can be achieved by using unthreaded string and a wooden stick, or you can use colurfull beads to add more interest like i show here. there are thousands of other ideas- i'm sure you can come up with more. (: