Friday, June 11, 2010

Random Recycling or Refashioning

What do you do with a perfectly good, but old and kinda yucky looking bulletin board? The silver framing was still in good shape so I decided I didn't want to cover it up, but the cork part was chewed up and written on and needed to be rehabbed somehow. I already have a bulletin board in my work space, but it is completely filled up and I really like the way it looks and don't want to take anything down off of it just yet. So instead of throwing this old bulletin board away I'm decided to recycle and repurpose it just for me.

In my stash I found a good olivey mottled olive green with an interesting black print, this reminds me of those pretty iron fences you see in European gardens. I chose this fabric because I thought the color of it would look good with my orange wall where the bulletin board will be going when it is all done. I carefully ironed a hem on all four sides, continually checking that it was going to fit to cover the cork as close to exactly as I could manage. I actually ironed on the bulletin board, which worked out with no singeing of cork. I also tried to keep the linear design of the fabric straight, on the off chance that it being slightly askew would actually end up bothering me.I was going to glue down the fabric to the bulletin board surface around the edge, but I decided to forgo the glue and go straight to thumbtacks. Impatient much? Um, yes! I wanted to attach some black satin ribbon in angles across the surface so I used the ladybug thumbtacks I'd been saving "for something". Instead of measuring or figuring out ahead of time a sensible pattern, I just kind of went for it until I ran out of black ribbon. I found that I had to keep pulling and smoothing the fabric as I went to keep it taut and flat enough, but it worked out pretty well in the end.And here it is all done. Pretty random, but I like it. Reminds me of those spiderwebs that the spiders given various hallucinogenic drugs make.
And no, I haven't put anything up on it yet, so I don't actually know that it works to hold anything at all besides black ribbon...

1 comment:

Jaye said...

It will hold photos and bits of paper. That is what I put on mine.