Photobooth Speech Bubbles, Minus the Chalk

I am so flippin' excited that we're going to have a photobooth at our wedding!  And yeah, I know it's one of those things that's been done everywhere at this point, but I honestly don't care about that in the slightest.  The idea of giving our guests a fun, non-dancing activity during our reception is totally worth it to me.  (Not that we don't want people to dance, of course.  We just want them to have options.)  Our photobooth package includes a box of props, which is great because it means we don't have to raid the Halloween stores on Nov. 1 to find our own (although that did sound kinda fun).  But we still wanted to find a way to personalize things just a bit.  

I'd seen pictures of those awesome chalkboard speech bubbles, and I thought that might be our answer.  But when I talked to Mr. FW about it he seemed concerned.  It's not that he thought it was a bad idea, no no.  He just thought it would make me freak out to be near chalkboards on our wedding day.  See...  I have a bit of a chalk phobia.  For realz, just typing out the word chalk makes me shiver.  I can't stand anything about it - the way it feels in your hand, the way it sounds when you're writing with it, the dust it creates when you erase it.  Ugh...  seriously, it's a problem.  

So Mr. FW went searching for alternatives, and he discovered the ingeniousness of white board contact paper.  Yep, it's contact paper that you can write on with dry erase markers.   You can probably purchase it a lot of places, but we're online people so we bought ours on Amazon.

{GoWrite dry erase rolls on Amazon.com, $8.99}

Mr. FW banged out two bubbles in just a few hours, and each step was pretty simple.  Here's a little tutorial we put together for you.

We have a lot of cardbox boxes around the house lately, so Mr. FW cut up a few of those to use as the backing for our bubbles.  He sketched out both a speech bubble and a thought bubble then he got to cutting.

First he cut out the bubbles, then he used those as templates to cut out the whiteboard paper.  A little note here: We found out the hard way that the contact paper isn't super thick, so we could see the writing on the cardboard through the paper.  Mr. FW said that if he was doing it over again he'd also cut out a single piece of printer paper to attach first to the cardboard, under the contact paper.

To give them just a little extra oomph, I inked on a simple blue border with a Sharpie marker.

Mr. FW attached some paint stir sticks (is that what those are called?) to the back, and then they were finished!  We haven't tested them yet with the dry erase markers, but I feel pretty certain they're going to be fine because all the reviews of this contact paper were very complimentary.  Just in case, though, we're packing up a small spray bottle of cleaner and napkins.  Now I just can't wait to see what how creative our guests will be with these!

Any other chalk phobes out there?  Also, I can imagine a lot of other uses for these little bubbles besides a photobooth.  What would you use them for?