French Memo Board Guest Book Part 1 (or, the Longest Running Project for this Wedding)

I figured out my guest book situation a long, long, looong time ago. Somewhere in March or April, I believe. (By the way, I didn't do anything else to the finished project from that post. Other than make about a bazillion more of them) Mrs. Cupcake from the Wedding Bee has a couple of pictures which helped inspire me to keep on a-moving with this project.

I started with a cheap canvas from Michael's because we will probably lean this up against a wall so I wanted to make sure it could support its own weight. It's not really that interesting of a DIY. I stuck some batting to the front of the canvas, wrapped a big piece of eggplant fabric around and stapled it to the back using the staple gun that BF's parents let me borrow. It ended up looking like this.
This was during my first attempt at step 2, during which I bought Floral Ribbon (why? why did I do that?! I don't know...) And this picture pretty much defines how that turned out:

Floral ribbon sucks. And there is no way that it would hold up to being stapled by a crazy person, er, a bride who's been trying to get this project started/finished for four months. (It was somewhere in July at this point... I think)

So, it went on hold for a little bit until I got some new ribbon for it. Fast forward to August, I got some new ribbon and I got this baby started!
(Aside: Half-assed DIYer that I am, I didn't really *trim* the fabric before attaching it to the canvas... so now I'm kind of trimming as I go along...)

Bo.J.: I can just eye it.
Reality: Bahahahahaha.

Yeah, so when I went to attach that mess up there to the back of the canvas, I realized that I could no more eye it than wear it as a hat so I started to measure 5 inches between the ribbons. So then I had to cut more ribbon strands.

Reality: What did we learn?

I was pretty impressed with myself at this point, it looks snazzy!

And then I ran out of ribbon. Like, immediately after finishing this. Probably because I had to re-cut the ribbon... but I'm going to blame it on the deceptive packaging of ribbon rolls.

So, I got some more ribbon and then this weekend when I had the first free time I've had in WEEKS, I pulled everything out to get started (and hopefully finish) this project.

I figured out my measurements for the criss-cross part and stapled one end of ribbon incorrectly. (OY!) Then I ripped it out and restapled it. Fantastic!

I pulled the ribbon over, threading it over and under cause I'm cool like that, turned the canvas over to staple and...

No staples. OUT of staples. Well, that's ok. I have a WHOLE box of staples.

THAT I CAN'T FIND.

Literally, I turned our dining-room-turned-wedding-room upside down from this:
To this:
And there were no staples to be found. So... this project is on hold once again. I know that as soon as I stop looking for the staples, I'll find them. But I've been pointedly not looking for close to three days now and they still haven't turned up. On the bright side, our dining room is a little more livable!

Did anyone else have a project that just refused to die?