Get the Memo

The last leg of my Craft Area World Tour brought me to the wall space behind my craft table. There is a large plank of wood stored behind the table (It’s actually a piece of wood cut out to be a table-topper that turns into a train table. It belonged to my father in law as a boy and we’re holding onto it for our own kids. Pretty cool!) At any rate, it’s stuck where it is, and it isn’t exactly pretty to look out. It doesn't exactly scream "crafty".  So I set out to find some solution for giving it a makeover without permanently altering it (painting wasn’t an option).

I picked up a four-pack of cork squares at Michael’s on sale for $5 (they are normally $10 for a 4 pack). Using some fabric I found during my great closet clean-outs this month, I laid the square out and cut the fabric so there was just enough left around the edges to wrap it around.

I secured those edges to the back of the cork square with a little hot glue.

**Helpful hint!** If you want to get “hospital corners” on a project like this, cut a small incision INTO the corner of the fabric. That will allow you to lay each side of the corner flat so you don’t have any ugly bunching. Make sense?

Once my fabric was on, I took some ribbon I already had on hand and laid it out in a pattern that looked like a memo board. I pinned down the ribbon to hold it in place, and then fastened the ends to the back with hot glue.

The ribbon isn’t exactly functional yet. In order for it to hold things on without the aid of a push pin, it will probably need a fastener of some sort at each cross section of ribbon. I didn’t really have anything on hand that would work, and I didn't want to spend any more moo-la on this space, so this will do for now.

Using the double-sided tape that came with the memo boards, I fastened this to the wall/wood behind my table. Not only does it help to spruce up the look of the area, it’s the perfect place for display pictures, inspiration I clip out of magazine and catalogs, or instructions, fabric swatches, and craft store shopping lists.

The Copycat Rundown:

Total Cost: Five dolla! Holla!

Total Time Spent: About an hour for all four. I burned the HECK out of my finger with the glue gun during this project, so about 10 minutes of that hour was spent hopping around holding my finger and throwing angry looks in the general direction of the glue gun.

Would we do this again? Yes! I’d like to try my hand at covering an actual bulletin board next.

Credit: Yours truly. Its getting crazy over here, what with all the originality and all!

Check back tomorrow for--are you ready for this-- THE BIG REVEAL. Oh, dear. I'm afraid I've built this up so much you're going to be disappointed. But I'm excited! So, yay!