DIY Nautical Cork Boards

It seems like the world is obsessed with nautical things lately and I am no exception.  Anchors, sails, and whales and let's not even begin to talk about navy blue and white stripped anything!  Something about these images and color schemes is so appealing to me and makes me happy :)

So of course when it came time to move back to school I wanted to bring the nautical with me to brighten my days!

I saw an idea on Pinterest (where else?) using little cork boards from IKEA and since I am lucky enough to live right by an IKEA I popped in one weekend and grabbed myself a 3-pack!

The Pinterest idea, you may have seen it before, its pretty popular, is to cover these cork board circles with fabric.  I however did not have any nautical fabric (tragedy!) so I resorted to another solution.

Paint!  I don't know what is wrong with me but I am in a painting phase lately.  It is really fun!

On to the tutorial! Yay!

Here is what you need to look for in IKEA:

Even if you don't have much time you can go in and get some, they are right by the registers (at least in my store) so you can just go in the exit to avoid an hour long maze!

Next you need to go online and find some nautical images.  Try to choose relatively simple ones, unless of course you are an expert cutter and painter :)

I just searched google for nautical shapes and copied and pasted the ones I liked into Microsoft Word.  If you can't find an image of just an anchor or just a sailboat, just copy and paste the whole image and then use the crop feature to select the area with your favorite image.  I then made the image bigger and printed in gray scale.

The next step is to cut them each out, very carefully.  This takes a while and isn't that fun, especially when you get to the middle of the wheel (I used an exact-o knife - be careful with those things!).

Here are my cutouts on my cork-boards.  So the next step is to outline the images onto the cork.  I forgot to take a picture after I completed that step (sorry about that!) but basically when you outline them you will create a slight indent into the cork with the pen which will help you keep the paint in check later.

So after quite a bit of tedious painting, here is my finished product:

What do you think?? I love them!  Leave me a comment with any questions or just to say hi!

Thanks so much for reading by blog :)

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