Cheap Thrills: Upcycling White Boards into Lap Desks

I teach in the South. Therefore, I must be cheap.(Lol, sort of.)

My bouncy bunch loves to work around the room, and they certainly do better that way. They don't always love using clipboards, though, and as a lefty, I totally get that. (We had an inordinate number of lefties in this class, 26 people, counting me, and 5 of us are lefties, and one is quite ambidextrous.) The stupid giant metal clip thingy is always in the way. I typically use them upside-down, which gets me funny looks, sometimes, from the staff at the doctor's office.

So I was looking for a way to make some inexpensive lap desks. Plywood would be heavy and have splinters, and frankly, I didn't want that big a project. Then I cleaned out a classroom closet to move rooms and found where I'd chucked some really beat-down, old whiteboards. Bingo!

I coated one side with chalkboard spray paint and put washi tape around the edges. (Ditched the dotted stuff after one; chevrons looked better and was a wider tape.)

Then I flipped them over and hot-glued the edge of the right side (the patterned side) of a cute piece of fabric to the underside of the board.

I gave that a couple of minutes to cool and to set, then made a fold to glue down the next side. The fold makes sure that I'm still gluing the right side to the board's bottom and gives me room for the stuffing.

I did the same thing with the bottom seam, then sacrificed an old, ratty pillow that was on the guest bed for its stuffing. When I was done stuffing, I tucked under the fabric for the last side and glued.

Ta-da! Since I already had the paint and the tape, I only had to spend for the fabric, which was about $8 at Hobby Lobby and enough to make eight. If you had to buy paint, a can's about $4 at Lowe's and the washi tape was at Target for about $3. A second pillow was sacrificed, but nobody's going to miss it.

Cheap and easy! The kids are going to love them!