Made It Monday: Fabric Covered and Framed Memo Board

It looks a LOT smaller in the photo, but this thing is big! I wanted to make a large memo board to go over my sewing table and got lucky finding some deals at Hobby Lobby. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted, but was ecstatic when I found a frame in the clearance section that fit the memo board! The memo board (corkboard) is 23" x 35". It was unframed (they had cork boards the same size with a thin wooden frame around them, but luckily they also had one this size unframed). I paid about $10 for the cork board - they were on sale that week. I looked in the frame department and they had a few open wooden frames this large, but I wasn't overly thrilled with any of them and they were expensive. I picked one out - kind of plain but knew I would spray paint it and that should make it look a little better. I wanted to use navy and pink colors on this project to match my sewing room so I went over to the fabric department and got the navy quatrefoil fabric to cover the cork board and pink gingham fabric for some accents. Hobby Lobby had all of their brand of scrapbook embellishments 50% off (as they often do), so I picked up the burlap banner (used around the "flower" in the corner of the board) and the burlap flower. While I was picking things out, an announcement came over the loud speaker in the store telling shoppers not to miss the clearance section with items newly marked down 80%. Well I couldn't miss that so I wheeled my cart on over and found THE FRAME!!!! They had a ton of frames and they were all stacked on top of each other so I had to dig through them and there it was! I loved it AND it was on clearance from $69.99 to $13.99!!! Much cheaper and much cuter than original fame I found - I couldn't believe it! It was one of those moments when all the stars were aligned :) It was black, but I already had my spray paint and knew a few coats would make it perfect.

Got home. Painted my frame and while it was drying I covered the corkboard with the fabric and made the goodies to go on it. I simply stretched the fabric taut over the front of the corkboard and used a staple gun to staple the fabric to the back. I made a large "rosette" out of some of the pink gingham fabric, put the burlap flower on top of that and made a fabric-covered button (with some of the navy quatrefoil fabric) in center. I put that in the top corner of the memo board and added the burlap banner around the side.

I also made some more fabric-covered buttons with the pink gingham fabric and hot glued thumbtacks to the back of them to use when I attach "memos" on my memo board. To make the fabric covered buttons, I used a kit like this:

I buy these in bulk on etsy, so I already had a ton of them. They are 1 1/8" so they are pretty big, which I wanted. The buttons have a shank on the back, but I used plyers to remove the shanks so I could hot glue the thumbtacks to the back.

When the the paint on the frame dried I popped the memo board into it and hung it up! I really like how it turned out! I also have a picture of the first thing I hung on it: