Pottery barn cork board knock off

I saw this bulletin board in Pottery Barn's catalog recently and knew I had to make a knock off. As a constant garage saler, I know that bulletin boards are a dime a dozen, I just had to wait until I found one. And last Friday I found one...for a dime! So with this pottery barn picture and this post for inspiration, I set to work.

And this is what I came up with! Isn't it amazing?! It's probably my favorite thing I have crafted so far.

Here is the before picture that I took when I was so darn giddy for finding this for a dime!

And a close up of the back in need of a cork board.

I knew I could buy cork, but decided to use some cardboard that I had lying around. I had my husband cut it to size. He doesn't trust me with large sharp objects!

I then covered it with burlap. I thought I would share my trick on cutting burlap. You find where you want to cut, then pull the thread that is there totally out.

When you pull it will gather, just keep tugging.

It then leaves you with a gap in the burlap so then you know where to cut and as a bonus, you get a nice straight line!

I then took the burlap and stapled it down. When I did the corners, I wrapped them like I would wrap a package. The more staples the better, you want it to be tight!

Then I used my super industrial glue gun on high temp, glued the whole cardboard down and put my husbands weights on it to help it set.

Then the fun started! The Pottery Barn board has postage stamp like designs on it, and I looked and looked for any clip art I could use or large stamps from the craft store, and came up empty handed. I finally just bit the bullet, and thought I would try to free hand it. So, I went on a little hunt around the house and used the above objects as my stencil. I just brushed the edges with black paint, pressed them down on a test paper to get rid of some of the paint, then put it where I wanted on the burlap.

Then I took my paint and free handed the things inside. I was SO nervous about this part because I didn't want to mess it up, but I think it turned out really well! And I love it, because each "stamp" has significance to our family. The T stands for our last name, there are 5 of us in our family, we live in the Seattle area, and the 3 is for our three kids.. I even put our wedding date on there!

Here it is before I put the wire on it.

You could stop here, but why?

I found some large gauge wire today in the floral section of JoAnn's. I put nails into the sides at 12 inches and 6 inches up from the bottom and secured the wire by twisting it to the nails. I even added curtain rings to clip things to.

Don't you love it? I do! Oh, and I forgot to mention, the space needle picture is on there because it's where we got engaged twelve years ago!

The back is still a chalkboard so I can put our nightly menu on it. Hopefully, it will put a stop to my tween asking every three minutes what's for dinner!

I am linking up to some of these parties

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