Meet my new state-of-the-heart bulletin board.
This is what it looked like when I bought it (at a thrift store, of course). It had a nice beefy frame that was painted in a neutral cream color — and the paint was chipping in spots, so there was a little bit of mint green showing through here and there. I loved the chunky, chippy old frame. The orange cork, not so much.
To de-orangify the cork, I broke out some leftover cream chalk paint (Americana Decor Chalky Finish/Lace). It took two coats to cover.
I didn’t want my lovely new/old bulletin board to get overwhelmed with notes and photos and general clutter, so I decided I’d put a neat, orderly collage on the top half of it. To make the collage, I picked up three packages of different sized heart cutouts.
The pink and red were not working for me, so I painted the hearts black.
I found a map of Wisconsin online that I sized to fit the width of the bulletin board and printed out.
I lined up the tiled pieces of the map, taped them together and then cut around the perimeter.
Next I lightly traced all the way around the border with a pencil.
Then I started filling inside the map with my hearts.
I started at the bottom and worked from the outside in.
I tried to keep the outside row of hearts as close to the border as I could. I also tried to keep the pattern random, alternating the sizes of the hearts and the direction they were facing as much as possible.
When I had all the pieces roughly where I wanted them to go, I adhered them to the board. The formerly red glitter hearts I stuck down with rubber cement. The others were peel-and-stick.
The last thing I did was erase the pencil line. (I started erasing it before I adhered the hearts, but every time I tried blowing the eraser residue away I would inadvertently blow unattached hearts all over. So eventually I wised up and realized I would be better off to stick everything down first.)
Here’s the bulletin board propped up on my desk. I can still tack notes and things to the bottom half of the board, but the top is all nice and neat.
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