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:

SO TRUE!!  Ha!

In addition to some crafting, I've been getting a few things ready to upload to my Teachers Pay Teachers store:

Here's a picture of it hanging on my wall:

and a fun math/counting activity:

These should be up in the next day or so.  I've got a few more new things that I recently added, you can click here to see them.

Also, don't forget to enter my Summer Giveaway #2 raffle!  Click here or on the photo to see it now!

Have a GREAT week!

Don't Forget To Use Spaces! {Spaceman Freebie} for Made it Monday

I've got a Spaceman Freebie but first, I have some new products added to my Teachers Pay Teachers store:

⤤ SUPER EASY to implement - GREAT for the first weeks of school!!!!

Click on the pictures to check them out or click HERE to visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store and click HERE to get a FREE kit each month!!

Wonder how many times I've had to remind students to use spaces between words when writing?  Maybe a million!  I've been wanting some "spacemen" to help students remember to use those spaces, so I decided to make some.  

If you would like to make some too, I have a free download for you right here:
{Click here or on the picture to download}

BTW, I post a lot of freebies on my blog -  if you don't want to miss any of them, make sure to click on this button follow me on bloglovin':

There are a couple of ways to do this - the easiest would be to print on cardstock, laminate, and cut into strips.  They can be used this way, might get a little worn after a while but it would be easy enough to replace them each school year.

To make them super sturdy,  I wanted to make mine to fit on large craft sticks (the kind sized
6 inches x 3/4 inch).  I bought these at Walmart:

I tried using Mod Podge at first, and that worked good,



  but I realized I had a MUCH easier way to do it so I broke out my trusty Xyron machine with the laminate/permanent adhesive cartridge:

This:

   

That's the smaller one, that works just as good, I have the larger one here:

I got mine years ago and it's a lot cheaper now!

I loaded in the printout of Spacemen...

and out they came, laminated with permanent adhesive on the back.

Then I just cut out on the lines (I used my paper cutter) and peeled the backing off to stick on the craft stick.

I have these sized to fit the craft sticks exactly with just a little extra on the top and bottom.  

 I made that extra space on purpose - here's a little trick to trim off that top and bottom and make it perfectly molded to the stick.  Use a fingernail file!  Just use a downward motion pressing the file to the stick where the paper is hanging over.  It files the paper and laminate away and shapes it to the edges of the stick:

Now they are ready to use!!