Kids' Bike License Plates

I got this idea from Janiel's blog, which you can't visit because she's gone private since I stumbled across her over a year ago. Sorry. Regardless, you can still benefit from her crafty wisdom, because I've stolen her idea and I'm sharing it with you today. Because I'm a thief.

Surely you've seen the cutesy bike license plates that you can buy for your kids, right? Except that you can never find your kid's name, or if you can, they spelled it wrong because apparently license plate manufacturers are illiterate. Or maybe it's me? 

Anyway, I do have a point here. If you want to make license plates for your kids, the Idaho Transportation website has this little dealie bob where you type in a plate name you want to search for, and then it pops up for you to preview it. Probably they don't intend for you to save that little preview to your desktop and print it for your own evil purposes, but that's exactly what I did. Because Janiel did it first, and I rationalized that it must be okay if she did it. Right?

And, oopsie, I might have gone a little crazy and made some for a few of my peeps' kids too.

After I lifted my counterfeit plates off the Idaho Transportation website, I printed them out as 4x6 prints and then trimmed away the white bits on the top and bottom.

Then I mounted them on white card stock and laminated them so they would survive when one of my little angels left their bike out in the rain. Or drove through a mud puddle. Or was attacked by a slobbering Saint Bernard. Or whatever. Use your imagination.

The final step was to punch two holes at the top and reinforce them with eyelets. Yes, I know I said two and you see four holes there, but remember, I'm Bob Vila's nightmare and I measure once and cut twice. Against his stern advice. 

And apparently it matters where exactly your holes should go depending on whose bike it's going on and where exactly you are going to attach it. So you should probably listen to Bob Vila, and first figure out where you are going to mount yours and then where your holes should go. Then you just take a couple of zip ties, thread them through your holes and TA-DA, your offspring are all street legal. Or at least they look like they are. Because they're counterfeit plates, remember?

Did you know that some people are very picky about their license plates? When we moved here and had to get Idaho plates, Peanut Head refused to get the standard Idaho plates because they have "Famous Potatoes" on them. He was so adamant about it, that we are paying $20 extra every ding dang year just so he can drive around without the famous potatoes on his car. And he loves french fries!

I mean I could understand if Idaho were the Broccoli capital of the world and the plates exclaimed Buxom Broccoli!, but Famous Potatoes? 

He's so lucky that I made him a plate for his bike and resisted the very tempting urge to pick the potato plates. I know Peanut Head is going to be so excited to see his plate. I am so good to that man.

If any of you find websites for other states where you can do this, please leave a comment with the web address so we can all have plates for our states. Wouldn't that be cool? We could make personalized plates for all our nieces and nephews for Christmas. People everywhere will covet our counterfeit plates. [Sigh.]