Noticeboard Make Over

Let's take a moment to appreciate the humble cork pin-board shall we?

I am in the process of attempting to create a more inspirational blogging work space and I have accumulated several things that I would like to display in my office; you know the types of things right? Cute postcards from Paperchase, photos and magazine tear outs... oh, and then there's the actual useful things like to-do lists of course!

Having looked a lot online for something a bit different (and realising I would need to take out a small bank loan to get something I liked) I thought I would get all Blue Peter and re-vamp a cheap and cheerful cork board. I am pretty happy with the results actually. Here's how I got on...

What you will need:

I decided to go for a zig-zag pattern on mine so had to spend several minutes marking out (in pencil) where the centre of the cork part of the board was and deciding how big I wanted the main (top) zig-zag to be. Once I had measured it all out, so it was evenly spaced, I masked out that section and painted it with three coats of pale pink paint. I then repeated the process for a thinner line underneath, masked it out and painted it in a mint green colour. I got the two coloured paints from our local DIY shop, Homebase, who had a 'buy one, get one half price' on tester pots.

For the final section I masked out larger triangles and painted these with white acrylic paint I had lying about the office, but you could use tester pots or repeat one of the other colours - anything that works for you!

Finally I painted the three colours over the frame, just to make it look a bit more interesting and add some character. I did this by hand but you could mask these sections in to make life a bit easier.

A couple of tips:

- Make sure you leave each section to dry overnight as your masking tape may lift off the sections you have just completed. Honestly, it is not worth rushing it!

- If you are doing a zig-zag pattern like mine take the time to really measure it and ensure that the lines are the same thickness all the way round, it will look a lot more pleasing on the eye if you do it this way rather than guessing it.

If you make something similar please do Tweet me your pictures! I would love to see the finished results.