Made 4 Math #6

I cannot believe it is already the SIXTH #made4math

This week my post is very inspired from other #made4math -ers as well as all those elementary teachers out there who are always making super cool printables. The post that really got me going was from the MathSmith, she had a great post about ColourLovers and how you could use their patterns for your blogs background (PS Its how I have a new chevron background :) ). This got my wheels spinning on how I could use this to make binder covers. Warning: This does take a lot of patience and time, but I think the fact that you can customize these to be whatever you’d like is really priceless.

First up you need to go to colourlovers.com and make an account. Its free and easy!

After you’ve made your account go and look at the patterns – don’t worry about the colours, we can change those later!

Once you find a pattern you like you have three options.
1. Use this one as is
2. Browse similar patterns
3. Color this pattern (for tutorial purposes we’ll be coloring our own pattern)

Now over to the MathSmith’s post she shows you how to go through a cropping process to get the image to be seamless, well after I wrote this post the first time (and cropped everything myself) I figured out how to do it the easy way!!! *facepalm* (PS OMG doing it this way makes it so much faster!!!!!)

Once you’ve created your pattern it’ll take you to this screen. Look over on the bottom right of this picture and you’ll see all the different size options. Click on preview! It’ll take you to the picture, right click and save it somewhere on your computer!

Here are the two patterns I made for my binder cover:

Now onto the binder cover!!!! Open up PowerPoint!!!!

First thing we need to fix is the size of the slide, so go to File > Page Setup…

Change the size of the paper to standard paper size of 8.5 x 11 – your computer might prompt you saying it needs to resize the file that is fine. You can’t print out an 8.5×11 color picture you need to have a little space around the edges anyway.

The easiest way I’ve found to insert your pattern into the file is to use the rectangle tool and place it where you’d like it to go.

Now don’t worry about the sides overflowing it doesn’t matter, the left is what your page will look like. You need to format your rectangle though, so take away its drop shadow and also its line, we need to fill it using the fill effects option.

Go over to the picture or template and browse for your pattern. Click the tile button and press ok and then your rectangle should look like the one I have in the background.

Use a couple more rectangle tools and you should have a basic background. Next I used a rounded rectangle tool put it in the middle and added some text.

Here is my finished product, now just save it as a PDF and print that sucker out!

Here it is all printed out and stuck in a binder!

Well I hope you found this tutorial useful, it can be used for endless things – I just really needed some binder covers!!