How to Make a Letter Board | DIY Felt Memo Board Project Using Simple Materials

I’ve always liked the old-school look of a letter board, and I thought it would be fairly simple to make at home…which it is! I tried to use accessible tools and materials so you can follow along easily. Have fun!

1. 3 mm Thick Felt; I used a 25 x 30 cm sheet
2. Peg letter board letter pack; I bought 294 characters, white, 13 mm tall. I bought mine from Braccio (a UK site)
3. Lightweight porous paper with letter design – I like Lokta paper
4. 30 x 30 cm mounted canvas, staple remover & sandpaper OR a picture frame
5. Acrylic paint
6. Scissors
7. Paintbrush
8. Thin stiff card; I reused some packaging
9. PVA glue & a plastic cup
10. Strong clear glue - I used UHU all purpose glue
11. Rotary cutter, cutting mat (with a grid ideally) & metal ruler
12. Paper and pen
13. And if you want to make a pouch for the letters, you’ll need: fabric, a sewing machine (or sewing needle), sewing pins, safety pin, matching thread and some cord/string. I embossed my fabric with an alphabet design, and to do this you would need (wood, metal or rubber) letter shapes or stamps, an iron, a water spray, and velvet that contains rayon, silk or acetate - don’t use velvet that contains polyester or nylon.

The initial step is to prepare the frame. I’m using the frame from a mounted canvas, so I needed to remove the staples and canvas first.

This left a wooden frame that was a bit rough so I lightly sanded it all over.

(Obviously if you are using a pre-finished picture frame you can skip this step.)

To make the frame look less...ugly...I then decoupaged it using some thin ‘alphabet’ patterned paper.

I first cut a strip of paper wide enough to wrap around one side of the frame, then I trimmed it down to fit, bit by bit. It helps to fold the paper where you want to cut first, rather than cutting straight away. I wanted a strip per side, with all of them joining up along the mitre joints.

To attach the paper, I painted PVA glue onto the frame, laid the paper on top, then applied more PVA on top.

(Note that I diluted the pva glue slightly with water to do this.)

Leave to dry.

To make the backing for the frame, I reused card packaging.

I glued 2 squares of cereal box card together, making the squares about 2 cm wider and longer than the inside opening of the frame, and then I glued a slightly larger square of stiff white cardboard to the back.

Note that if you use cereal box card, make sure the glossy side is not facing outwards.

I painted the smaller front area with acrylic paint. Make sure the front of the card approximately matches the colour of the felt you're using.

Next, cut your felt into strips, all the same width. Don't worry about the length of the strips just yet - as long as they're longer than the width of your frame opening, it's all good.

Measure the vertical distance between the pegs on the back of the plastic letters, and that will tell you how wide your felt strips needs to be. Mine needed to be 4 mm wide.

Even though it's possible to cut with scissors, it's difficult to get a straight line. Using a rotary cutter (with a new blade!) and a metal ruler on a cutting mat is so much easier.

I first cut a strip of paper 4mm wide to use as my template for the initial strip. After that, I used a felt strip as my guide instead.

To cut the felt, run the rotary cutter along the edge of your ruler, repeatedly, only in the forwards direction. It helps to line up the felt with the grid on the cutting mat to make sure it's all square & straight.

Keep testing the letters on the strips as you go, making sure the letters can be pressed onto the strip fairly easily, and don’t easily fall off.

Note that felt can distort, but you can use this to your advantage and carefully stretch the strips of felt if you’ve cut them a tad too wide (as long as you’ve cut them in the direction that allows that). Don’t stretch the strips too much though, because then they’ll become uneven, too thin and fluffy.

Use strong clear glue to attach the backing to the back of the wooden frame.

Keep heavy books (or similar) on top until the glue dries.

Then draw lines every 1" all the way down the backing card. This is for the next step, to allow you to make sure the felt strips stay level and don't end up slanting one way or the other.

Cut a handful of the felt strips to the correct length, apply glue to a section of the backing, then position the felt strips onto the glue. They need to have a very narrow gap between each strip (approx. the thickness of a metal ruler).

As you attach the strips, keep testing with the letters to make sure you can push them in and they remain in place.

Also make sure the strips stay in line with the pen lines you've added.

Repeat until the backing is covered, and then leave to dry.

To hang the letter board up, I just attached 2 self-adhesive Command strips to the back.

To emboss the velvet, I first placed the wooden letters onto the ironing board (in reverse) in the positions I wanted them to be embossed in. I then carefully lowered the velvet (right-side-down) on top, sprayed the velvet with water, and pressed the iron - on a low heat setting - on top of the letters for 10 seconds or so.

If you can't see the outline of the letters on the back of the velvet, you haven't pressed for long enough.

I wanted to have a transparent back on the pouch for the letters, so I used red organza in addition to the velvet.

You want to cut the same shape out of both fabrics, and then hem all of the long edges. I did this because these fabrics move all over the place and are not stable - hemming seems to help this. You wouldn't need to hem if you used a stable fabric like woven cotton for instance.

I used black thread so you could see it, but you'd want to use a matching thread instead.

Place the 2 pieces right-sides-together, pin, and sew along every side except the top edge. Make sure to sew inside the hems you've sewn (if you've hemmed). On the long edges, stop 'x' distance from the top edge, where x = (2 x the width you want the drawstring channel to be) + 1/4". So if you want the channel to be 1/2" wide, you'll want to stop sewing 1 1/4" from the top edge.

Alway remember to backstitch at the beginning and end of your sewn lines to secure the stitches.

Use a ruler and rotary cutter to trim down all the edges to make them straight and square. Of course, don't cut too close to the lines you've stitched.

Fold down the top edge to form your channel, and sew this edge in place all the way around. If using my previous suggested measurements, you'll want a finished channel that's 1/2" wide.

(Note that I did this wrong and sewed the channel 1" wide instead oops! But it's not a problem, it just made it harder to sew.)

If you don't have a sewing machine & want to sew by hand instead, use the backstitch.

Turn the pouch right-sides-out.

Cut 2 pieces of cord that measure about 3 x the width of the pouch. Attach a safety pin to one end of one piece of cord, and feed it into the channel on one side, through the entire channel (both sides) and back out at the same point.

Repeat the same for the other piece of cord, but this time feed it into the other end of the channel to start.

Knot the ends of each cord pair. Trim off the excess.

Hang the board on the wall, put the letters into your new pouch, and that's it...the letter board is complete!

I hope you enjoyed this project :D