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 :)

Follow me on Pinterest!

Get new features added to Pinterest!

Have you ever been on Pinterest and thought "Oh I wish they had a feature where..."? Well I have and I've just discovered a way to tell Pinterest about your heart's desires!

Go to the help page on Pinterest:

Search for your idea: (my current wish is to have "sub boards", more on that in a second)

Click on the search result of your choosing:

Read the description to make sure its what you want and click Me Too!:

Confirm your vote gets counted:

It really is that easy and I had no idea they had this feature!  This makes me love Pinterest even more (if that's possible) as a company because this shows they care about their customers and want to make the site what WE want!  So awesome!

So anyways if you want to skip the above steps, go to this link:
https://en.help.pinterest.com/entries/21918998-Sub-boards

I really really REALLY want Pinterest to have sub boards.  This feature would mean being able to categorize your pins within your boards.

For example, I have a board for cards - if there were sub boards I could have Christmas, Halloween, Birthday, etc. boards within the cards board.

If I were creating the feature myself (and how I assume they would too) you would click on your, for this example, cards board and that would bring you to a page with more boards (the Christmas, Halloween, Birthday, etc. boards).

Simillarly if you were going to Pin something you would select cards board and then have the option to pick which sub board it would go into.

So if you, like me, would LOVE this feature, go to this link:
https://en.help.pinterest.com/entries/21918998-Sub-boards
And click Me Too! to vote.

Just think of the possibilities!



Keep calm and Pin On graphic from: www.empowernetwork.com
All screen shots and Pinterest logo from: Pinterest.com

Dollar Tree Storage Solutions

As promised, here is another post about my latest and greatest storage solutions.  Did I mention they are also affordable?? Here are a few ideas using items found at the dollar tree!

First up we have my Washi Tape Dispenser!

I forgot to take a before picture of the basket but it was just that, a basket (you can get the gist of it from the final product).  Below are a bunch of sticks that I think are supposed to go into a large vase or something like that but I just needed one of them to act as a dowel.  I figured a skinny dowel and the gas to get somewhere that sold one was probably more than $1 so I just bought these:

They're about 3ft long so I imagine I'll be able to find a use for the rest of them eventually :)

So I cut one of the sticks into two pieces that were the length of my basket.  Next, I put each stick through one of the holes on the end of the basket.  Then I loaded all of my washi tape onto them, making sure it would roll the right way, depending on which side I placed it.  Finally I pulled the other end of the stick through the opposite hole and hot glued a bead onto each end to prevent the sticks from falling out.  And there you have it!

Much better than a ziploc bag, no?  Here are a few more shots of it:

Now for the pill box organizer!

I wanted to get one of those trays that has a bunch of little square compartments in it, usually for make-up or tools or something.  But these are usually not very cheap so while I was at the dollar tree I found a better solution: pill boxes!

Please ignore the clothespins for now, more to come on them in the future! ;)

So these were, of course, $1 each! Can't beat it! And I liked them because each compartment is a pretty good size.  They had others available but they were too small.

I needed storage for these little 3D sticker/gem things that I have, and this fit the bill!

It is hard to tell from the picture but I was able to sort my gems; I have keys, birthday candles and hats, presents, graduation caps, bride and groom, so on and so forth.  It worked out perfectly with lucky number 7 compartments.  Now yes this was a great storage solution but, not too attractive for my craft room.  So I used my decorative duck tape to jazz things up a bit:

Not too shabby now!  Tell me your great storage ideas and check out more of mine here! :)

I really love comments!

Etsy Shop

Update:

I used the second pill box to store buttons! Again it works out perfectly and I decorated that one with pink tape! (Sorry, no pictures :/ )