Dining Room Plate Re-Do

About 7 years ago, my mom gave me these plates (below) and holder. I LOVED them and had a rooster theme for my kitchen.

But, gradually my tastes changed and they aren't as much my style any more so I haven't had them up in my kitchen for a while. Yesterday I had an idea about how to change them to fit the theme of our dining room. I saw this idea from a guest blogger on my friend, Nina's blog, about making a canvas wall hanging using book pages and I started thinking about doing something similar for these plates. First, I scrubbed down the plates with hot water, dish soap, and a stiff brush to remove all the built up dust and grease from being in the kitchen for years and dried them thoroughly. Then, using leftover pages from a book I used to make my book wreath, I tore up approx.20 pages (give or take) into little squares and mod podged them onto the rooster plates and brushed mod podge over all of it. I wanted to put some sort of wording on it and figured I would do something simple. The two basic rules of dinner that our kids seem to have the hardest time following. Sit. and Eat. I used the Cricut machine with the Plantin School Book cartridge to cut the letters and then put them on the still wet mod-podged surface of the book pages. Then I brushed it with mod podge again (Have I mentioned how much I LOVE that stuff?). Then I just let it dry. That's it. Easy. Free. And now I love my plates again.