Elmer's Office Paint Party

As most of you know Elmer’s is one of our clients and through our Glue ‘N Glitter community we have helped to create hundreds of fun craft, memory keeping and back to school projects.  Elmer’s loves the Social Fabric® community and the creativity each member brings, creating projects that help inspire others to get their creativity going!

Only problem, the Elmer’s office is anything but creative inside.  It’s your typical office space, with white walls and boring offices.  So, we decided to spruce it up a bit, starting with one HUGE blank white wall.

Elmer’s had just created these gorgeous matted boards that represent the Elmer’s family of products over the years – starting in 1904.  But they had them just leaning up against a wall on the ground, so we decided to create a timeline on the wall.

After drawing out our vision, Monica Johnson and I headed to Walmart to find a couple of Glidden Paint Testers to make sure we matched the Elmer’s classic blue and orange for the walls.  We settled on WGO11 Fresh Tangerines and WGB16 Cool Cobalt and picked up our remaining items we needed for the project.

At this point, we somehow convinced Brad Lawless to come and help us with our project.

We carefully measured our boxes using an Elmer’s project board as our template and began the most important part of any painting project – the taping!  We taped off a 28 foot large stripe and 16 boxes to complete our guide.

The painting began and the colors were perfect!  We were so excited about how great it looked already and anxious to start ripping the tape off so we could see our perfect lines.  But we were disappointed with the painters tape we purchased. All of our edges had bled.  What were we going to do now?  Brad and Monica headed back to Walmart to search the store for anything to help fix this disaster.  (Mind you, I am feeling a little pressure at this point because we decided to surprise the team leader of the Elmer’s office with our masterpiece while he was out on vacation – panic has set in!) We were going through any option we could think of; do we make borders around every edge, do we repaint, do we run and hide?

While Brad and Monica were finding themselves on an unsuccessful trip to the store to find a solution, Carrie of Elmer’s had a last ditch effort to salvage this wall – Painter’s Pens.  (Oh, the man at the Walmart paint counter did tell us we should have used Frog Tape, but we were a little late for advice at this point)  We each take a fine tip White Painter’s Pen and begin painting over the blue and orange that had ran out the edges – and it worked!  Carrie was a genius, who would have know this would work or even be the same color as the wall?  So, 6 of us with Painter Pens in hand set out to rectify the bleeding edges and we got it finished in less than an hour!

The wall turned out amazing and we each felt so proud to have been able to add some color to the Elmer’s office and give back to them.  The Elmer’s team even let us put a Collective Bias logo sticker below the 2010 mark to acknowledge when we started working together – I thought that was so sweet!

Lessons learned:

• Taping the edges is the most important part of a paint project.
• Glidden Paint Testers are great to test out different colors without having to buy a whole pint.
• Painter’s Pen serve more purposes that I ever knew
• Completing a painting project for someone else is fun and rewarding!

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