Baby Shower Welcome Board

My friend from church was having a baby shower, so I offered to draw a welcome board for her. She was having a girl, and said she likes pictures of food, so I came up with a hungry 'cupie' looking baby with an apple hat :) When I was still having morning sickness this spring, I found out she was going through the same thing too, so we became morning sickness buddies. (Whatever I mean by it, it was still encouraging...haha) Then I miscarried at 11 weeks, but that's another story. 

So I started looking for chalkboard for the welcome sign online. Again, I don't have a lot of money to spend so I'm looking for the best bang for the buck. One thing that I worried about was the texture of the board. Because unless you touch the surface, you can't tell if it'll have enough roughness to let the chalk powder sit on it instead of slipping, and not so rough that it'll have textures when you color in the surface. So I gave up on the online search. I did think about Ikea's kids easel with white and chalkboard surface. But I've drawn an it once (I'll post it after this, it's another project I did a while back) and it was really hard to work with because the powder kept slipping off the too-smooth surface. I did think about painting it with chalkboard paint to re-surface the easel. But what's the point of buying an Ikea easel (and paint to add cost) if I could get another perfectly fine board for about the same price? So I looked. And looked. And I found it at...not the craft store, not the commercial equipment for restaurants, but at...Ross! Haha. And it was affordable! 

I touched it, looked at it to make sure it's not super slick and shiny like the kids' easel  :) It's on the long side so I need to come up with solutions to fill the whole space, though. Other than that, it works! So I started doodling and put on some letters on paper...

I usually work during night time, because my kiddos like to draw too, of course, on my board -_-;; so it took me about a week drawing little by little. But here is the finished piece:

This extra sweet girl is being shipped to her parents, straight from the apple orchard :P