Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Something for Nothing


Because both of us use my desk for bills and scheduling, I knew I needed some kind of pinboard for the area to improve the function of the area. When I was out yesterday looking for towel racks and other items of bathroom decor I looked around and not only did not see anything I wanted, I saw nothing at all in that line. My original idea had been a ribbon board, but I thought some kind of cork board would answer my needs better. Then I started looking around the house to see what we had. I was thinking MDF, but we didn't have anything like that. It wasn't long before my eye fell upon some extra ceiling tiles in the corner of the laundry room. My thought was that with the right kind of fabric I could make a ribbon board of it. All of my fabric was given away or sold before we left Oklahoma City, so I started thinking of what I had that could be cut up to cover the ceiling tile. There were two possibilities: a set of king sized sheets that are waiting in the shed for a project to come along, and T shirts. The T shirts won because the sheets were not a color I can use for this project. My library is blue and yellow, so a navy blue T shirt promoting the Star Spencer Bobcat football team was pressed into service. I used the front of the shirt because I liked the logo and think it adds something fun to the pinboard, but I could have used the back if I wanted it to be plain. I was going to staple it, but I happened to have a can of  Super 77 spray adhesive that gave me a good smooth surface.  This was a better choice because ceiling tiles are not all that sturdy and staples might have broken it.  I cut off any part of the T shirt that stuck out over the tile edge and proceeded to cover the edges. The edges got a trimming of white grosgrain ribbon (my go to notion) around the top and folded over to cover the sides of the ceiling tile with  Sobo craft glue applied with a small brush to the ribbon and the raw edges of the ceiling tile. The ribbon stuck to the T shirt surface right away, but it took a while to get the glue to the desired state of stickiness to hold the ribbon flat to the sides. I just kept running my fingers over it to force the crease and get it to stick smoothly. I finished it up be making some custom pins by attaching some little shells I collected in Florida to T pins with  E-6000. Voila - cute, functional and FREE! The whole project took about two hours start to finish, including scrounging around for materials.

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