(another) Bulletin board refresh

 Years ago, I re-covered a bulletin board for The Girl's new apartment in Waco.  It had gone through several transformations from candy pink with glued on jewels, to the color that matched her Camp Rustown bedroom with a hand-lettered monogram in the middle, to all black. (for some reason I can't find all of those photos...oh, well)

 It was showing it's age...  faded in spots and pretty shabby.

When we visited her recently she asked if I would freshen it up with new burlap in a neutral color.  I love the combo of cork and memo board, and it's simple to do!

I pulled off the old burlap -  I had spray painted that sucker pretty well so the board itself would not show through the weave of the burlap.

So once again I needed to paint it.  This time I used a light sand paint I had leftover from painting The Girl's room when Scout moved into it - ironic, no?  A little bit of Scout's room (aka her old room) is moving back to Houston!

The light in the kitchen makes it look so yellow-y, but it actually works great for the new burlap.  I set it up in the window to dry until I could work on it the next day.

Here are my supplies - I ended up using a different ribbon, but I found these black tack hooks to add to the bottom of the board - genius!

 

Once the board was dry I laid the whole thing on the nearest surface to start stapling it - in this case, my bed is the perfect work area.

I trimmed up the burlap with my rotary cutter.  And I "painted" the edges of the burlap with some mod podge to act as a fray check.  I don't have a pic of that, but it dried super quick and you can't even tell its there.

So the above photo was Version One of finishing it up - I only bought one package of tacks so they looked too spread apart.  And I added the hooks on after the tacks, when I should have counted them as tacks themselves, for spacing purposes.  Easy to adjust!

Rooting around in my craft stash I found a couple of other designs of tacks in black and brass - the combo of them will look just fine.  And I re-did the tack and hook spacing as well as adding a tack at every point the ribbon intersects.  I really don't think she will mind - it looks more organic, somehow, to not have it all matchy-matchy.  Sort of a metaphor for real life not being perfect and all!

The Girl and I have chatted a lot this week about learning life as you go - its the same for everyone, I think.  There are no tutorials for that...  She'll be here this weekend for a quick visit and I hope she enjoys her "new" board until its next transformation!