DIY Project for the Day

We went over to the mo-in-law's house this morning and realized that she had quite a bit of fabric left over from the table runners she made us for the wedding.  By the way, have I mentioned how handy it is having a mo-in-law who is an amazing seamstress?!  Rather than renting fancier linens or spending more on centerpieces, I bought some fabric I love at the Online Fabric Store and mo-in-law sewed them into simple fabric runners for our wedding tables.  Super handy.

Anyways, we realized we had some extra fabric so I decided to use some of it to cover the cork board we'd planned to use for our escort cards.  This created a brand new DIY project for me and rather than thinking about it and planning, I did it right when we got home.  Thankfully, I didn't destroy anything so I can show you how I did it and my finished product.

All you need is:

A cork board/bulletin board, we bought ours at Target.  You're probably supposed to use one without a frame, but that's for people who plan ahead, not me!

Some fabric, ours is by Amy Butler and it's called Optic.  I looove it.  It's the perfect colors for our wedding and it's just modern enough for us.  If anyone wants a table runner in this pattern when the wedding is over...we have 3 extra!

A stapler, scissors, and a ruler.

You place the fabric face down on a hard surface, or if you're fancy like me, the floor.  Place the bulletin board face down on top of the fabric.  Measure your fabric so there is about a 1.5" border around the bulletin board and cut off any excess fabric.  We had some ratty edges on our fabric so I made sure to use that part for this project since it's not going to show.

Pull one edge of the fabric really tight and staple it to the bulletin board.  Make sure you pull it really tight so it doesn't cause wrinkles.  Do this all the way around the board.

That's it!  If you use a plain piece of cork board without a frame, you can then put a cute frame around the board, but I'm going to leave mine the way it is.  

I found some really cute yellow quilting pins at Walmart that I'm going to use to pin the escort cards to our board.  Bonus for the mo-in-law, she gets 100 yellow quilting pins after the wedding.

**Update:  the finished product at the wedding, I decided to use funny or embarrassing pictures of each guest instead of traditional escort cards. This is seriously my favorite thing I made for the wedding and it was a huge hit.