Handmade Cork Boards

So this is my first official project. I just sort of came up with the idea; it came out pretty good, I think :)


The cork boards were purchased on clearance at Target, and the ribbon and flowers are from Michael's craft store. I attached the ribbon to the board, experimenting with different patterns (explained in detail throughout), with a hot glue gun, and the flowers have metal on the back that I poked through to the other side and twisted around itself.

This is what the original cork boards all looked like:

Here they are after I attached the first two kinds of ribbon. In retrospect, I wouldn't use a hot glue gun to attach white ribbon, or white fabric of any kind, to anything. The glue shows right through. It isn't really all that noticeable unless you look closely at the board, though, so I just left it.

With the white ribbon, I tried wrapping the ribbon around the back of the board around the entire perimeter, but I ran across a problem when the two pieces of ribbon met. Not a pretty sight! So with the black ribbon I cut it in lengths the same as the board (12") and just overlapped at the corners.

I thought it would be a nice effect on the third kind of ribbon to have some sort of planned pattern to the ribbons' overlap, so I decided to have one end of each piece under (glued straight to the board) and the other end over top of the next. This took a little bit more planning, but not much, and I think the end result was worth it.

These next pictures demonstrate how I overlapped each piece. I glued one strip of ribbon until I had 1.5 - 2 inches of unglued ribbon left. I cut the next piece a little shorter than the end of the board, both to save a bit of ribbon and so I wouldn't have to decide what to do with the loose end!

Holding both pieces in place, I dotted some glue onto the cork, and stuck the second piece back down.

Next is the loose end of the first piece after having glued it to the shorter second piece. On each strip, I left a little bit of overhang.

I put a few dots of glue on the back side near the edge and tightly wrapped the little bit of ribbon around the back, so it looked like this:

That technique was an afterthought. On my first shot, I tried to cut the ribbon exactly the same length as the board, and the edge looked like this:

Both looked fine, but the wrap-around method was much less tedious since it didn't require exact measurements!

Here is the finished product:

I made the fourth board in the same fashion. Here they are all together: 

And here they are staggered, with the daisies, and on my wall. The boards came with their own little stickers to hang them with, so they're all just stuck up right onto the wall.

Not the fanciest of crafts, but easy and super cute!

***Update***
The stickers that came with the cork boards didn't hold out like I had hoped. ALL of the boards ended up on the floor! What did work was penny nails; my wonderful fiance put them back up for me! He even thought to tuck the nails underneath the fabric on the boards so you wouldn't be able to see the nails. Clever guy! ♥ ♥ ♥