Embroidery Hoop Chalkboard

Happy Tuesday Everyone!  The sun has just come out briefly, long enough to shine into my apartment and bring a big smile to my face.  It doesn’t hurt that I’m pretty excited about this newest project too!

For the last 3 months I have been planning to get this awesome big bookshelf/cabinet from Ikea.  And I knew I wanted to do some sort of big cork board of sorts above it, on my wall.  Well then I spotted this photo on Craftgawker, and fell in love with this look!

Since I wanted a functional cork board space, I decided why not take this look and make them into cork boards, like Project 2?

And then I spotted, probably on Pinterest, a project where someone had made an embroidery hoop chalkboard!!  I was so excited, I knew I had to create my own.

 

So apparently, there is such a thing as chalkboard fabric.  Who knew, right?  That’s probably what the original project was created with, but I decided that instead of bothering to try and figure out where one purchases such an amazing product, I could just use the chalkboard paint I already had from another project.  I simply traced a circle, the size of the embroidery hoop, onto a piece of foam core, and then painted the foam core with my chalkboard paint using a tiny roller set meant for painting sample colors on a wall.  The roller was made from foam, and left me with a somewhat rough finished surface, but I think it works just fine with the chalkboard look.

I think it looks nice with a decorative (drawn) chalk border, but I might change that as I figure out what to write on my chalkboard.  For now I like it with my inspirational phrase, but that’s the beauty of chalkboard, whenever I get bored I just have to wipe it off and I have a fresh start!  Just don’t forget to prime the surface of the chalkboard by rubbing the side of your piece of chalk all over and then wiping it off.  I think this just makes it easier to write on later.  I also found that the foam core tended to warp a bit with the paint, so I simply painted the back side as well, and it warped right back to flat.

While I was at it, I decided to start on some of my new pin boards that I wanted to create.  I used these beautiful fabrics designed by Jessica Jones of How About Orange.  I love her blog, and kept seeing her beautiful fabrics in awesome projects, so I just knew I had to buy a couple yards for my cork boards.  I chose three pink and orange fabrics from the Amusement Park Collection, but I also really like some of the green leaf patterns from the Modern Flora Collection.

The middle sized board was made using the same Ikea cork trivets as in Project 2.  But for the tiny little size, and the bigger size, I simply cut out foam core to be the right shape and size and covered that with fabric.  It actually works pretty well as a pin board, especially if I continue using the little round headed embroidery pins instead of regular larger push pins.  I liked the idea of having different sizes, for a more varied look.

And now, a special preview of my next 30x30x3 project.  I created these pink flowers, to cover an existing Lobbo shade from Ikea.  Can anyone guess what I used to create the flowers?  The first correct guess in the comments below will get a special shout-out in my official project post.  I have no idea if this is an obvious question or too obscure, so I can’t wait to see how quickly people can guess the right material!  

Ciao, Allison