By: Chris Stead

This month Rebecca graced us with a re-vamp of a message board. If you’re not familiar with message and photo boards, they are boards, covered in batting and hung from a wall where you can put messages, photos, fliers or whatever. We are not going to make one from scratch. This would involve machinery that most people don’t keep around their houses. Instead we found a message board at a junk shop that could be recovered, revamped and remade into a Gothy accent piece. Here’s how:

1. 
   Remove the vellum piece from the back of the board. Don’t damage it as we will be using it again later.
2. Remove the buttons from the front of the board. Unless you want to re-use these later by covering them with fabric or doing something creative with them, you can just toss them.
3. 
   Choose some fabric to cover the board with. Make sure that the material is opaque enough to obscure the pattern beneath. We chose a black satin-type matieral.
4. Stretch the material over the board and staple on the back.
5. Once the board is covered, then use ribbon and criss-cross it in the same pattern that the old ribbon followed and staple on the back of the board. We used a red, but other colors will work nicely.
6. 
   Staple the ribbon down at the places where the pieces intersect to secure them in place.
7. Choose a new type of button to cover the staples on the front. We used skull buttons, but there are a plethora of other types of things you can use: Replica Victorian buttons, studs and the like that come in a million different shapes and sizes or you could even use mis-matched buttons. Your imagination is the only limit. Hot glue the buttons in place.
8. 
   Lastly, hot glue the vellum backing on the back of the board and put sawtooth hangers on the back. That’s it! In less than an hour, no less.

All craft ideas are developed and provided by Rebecca Davis.