Bulletin Board Makeover

Covering a bulletin board with fabric is a really easy way to customize an otherwise boring, utilitarian thing on your wall. I used to do this all the time with my mom -- we would always make them as birthday gifts for my friends. It's a very easy craft project and it would make a great indoor/rainy day/quarantined/bored-due-to-the-pandemic craft. Let's get started!

Supplies:

• Bulletin board (23" x 17")
• A rectangular piece of felt (~27" x ~22")
• Another piece of felt (~19" x ~13")
• A rectangular piece of fabric (~27" x ~22")
• Spool of ribbon (~6 yards)
• Hot glue sticks
• Thumbtacks

Tools:

• Scissors
• Hot glue gun
• Sewing pins

I had some leftover felt from my Cerberus dog costume project, but you could also use thin quilt batting or anything like that to give the board a little more poof/oomph.

Cut the felt to be a few inches longer than the bulletin board on each side. So if you are covering a 23" x 17" bulletin board like mine, your rectangular piece of felt should be about ~27" x ~22". But you don't have to measure it. You can just eyeball it.

Place the bulletin board face-down on the rectangular piece of felt and hot glue the felt to the back of the board. I tried to fold and hot glue the corners as neat as I could. You don't want it to be all lumpy.

Then do the same thing with a ~27" x ~22" rectangular piece of fabric. I used this cat fabric that I love, that you may recognize from when I made my tablet holder pillow. Just hot glue it down to the back. It doesn't have to be perfect, but again, try to make the corners neat so it's not all lumpy.

Cut long strips of your ribbon and start placing them on top of the board where you want them. It's best to have them in perpendicular criss-cross lines. I started with two, each one going from corner to corner and crossing in the very center. I held them there with a thumbtack (that we'll reinforce in a second) where the ribbons cross each other and some sewing pins along the edges of the board.

Then I laid four more, one across each corner. Follow the drawing and the pictures and that should give you a better idea.

Once you have all the ribbons pinned and tacked down, you can lift one thumbtack, put a little bead of hot glue there, and then put the thumbtack back. These thumbtacks won't be able to be moved, of course, but this reinforces the ribbons so they don't move around.

When you're done with that, you can hot glue the excess ribbons around the back of the board. Don't forget to remove your sewing pins!

As for how you're going to hang it up, an easy way is to do that is to recycle a couple of soda can tabs. Bend them at the middle at a slight angle before hot gluing them to the top corners of the back of the board. Cover the bottom half with some excess ribbon so it's a little more secure.

And this next step is unnecessary, but I had a lot of extra felt and figured I would cover the ugliness on the back of the board. All I did was cut a rectangle of felt slightly smaller than the board (so about ~19" x ~13") and hot glue it to the back. This just covered the raw ends of the fabric and the ribbons that wrapped around the edges.

Now all that's left to do is hang it up on the wall and tuck in your pictures and postcards and other paper mementos. It's such a quick project but it really makes a huge difference. I love finding ways to add my personal touches on practical items around my house and this is an easy way to do that.