Tutorials

Children's Art Display

 (fast & easy)

My husband dragged home a piece of his cubicle from work a few weeks ago. He so thoughtfully gave it to me and said, "Here! You can make something out of this, right?" It took me a while to figure out what do with it. It's a light weight piece of plywood covered in a thin grey fabric 6 ft x 1.5 ft.

So, the plan was to keep my eyes open for some oversize wooden craft paperclips, glue them to the board, and make a place for my girls to display their art.

1. You can use any piece of left over wood, board, or Styrofoam. 

2. Cover it with fabric using a staple gun or regular stapler if the wood is soft. 

  (Mine was already covered in a neutral color.)

Tips:
Pull the fabric tight, fold it over the back, and staple one corner at a time. Hot glue would work too. 

If you are using Styrofoam, please be aware that hot glue will melt it quite a bit
so you have to be fast on the trigger.
If your fabric is thick, you may want to secure it with little dots of glue on the front side of the board. 

3. I stumbled across some decorative paperclips at Micheal's in the dollar bin -
measuring 3.5 in x .75 in.

They just happened to be in a variety of colors I like. I picked seven.

2. Measure the total length of your board and divide it by the number of paperclips. 

3. Place the paperclips evenly spaced across the board using a ruler.

4. I used a hot glue gun & a lot of glue to fasten each paperclip.
Tips:
Let the glue gun get really really hot. 

This will allow the glue to seep through the fabric well to really adhere to the board.

I didn't want to go to great lengths to screw or nail the paperclips. I was afraid that a nail would split the paperclip. A think a screw would work well drilling from the back side of the board. 

But since I did this project on my own, I had no way to stabilize the board for drilling.

5.  Go through your scraps of paper. I made a little frame that says, 

"The Ava & Luci Museum of Fine Art" 

This was super fun and easy to make!