DLTK's Crafts for Kids
Bulletin Board

Most "make your own" bulletin board directions I've read called for purchasing wood or cork of some sort.  As you know, I'm not that big on purchasing things for my children's crafts (we make so many of them we'd be broke in no time *laugh*)  so I've done one that uses newspaper instead!

We made the entire bulletin board with things we had lying around the house.

We made ours 8 1/2 x 11 but you could do a larger one.

Materials:

• cardboard backing from a paper pad or cardboard from an old cereal box cut to 8 1/2 x 11
• Piece of corrugated cardboard (cardboard box) cut to 8 1/2 x 11 inches.
• 10 pieces of newspaper or so
• 2 pieces of plain white paper
• 1 piece of material about 10 x 13 or so (we used an old, stained white T-shirt -- the unstained part).
• ribbon -- we used old ribbon from Christmas presents -- it doesn't have to be fancy cloth ribbon or anything.
• string or wool
• crafting glue gun (adults should help) OR safety pins.
• Push pins.
• tape
• Optional:  some sort of decorations.  Ex:
  • These could be special buttons or pins.
  • We made perler bead flowers to match our home made binders.  Check the binder page for how the flowers are made.

Instructions:

• Take the cardboard back off a paper pad or cut a piece of cereal box to 8 1/2 x 11
• Cut the piece of corrugated cardboard from a box to 8 1/2 x 11 inches.  This might require a bit of help from a grownup.
• Cut the pieces of newspaper to 8 1/2 x 11 inches.  You need about 20 of them (give or take).  The girls enjoyed tracing the cardboard and cutting it.
• Make a stack of all your materials in this order:
  • paper pad backing (or cereal box)
  • corrugated cardboard
  • newspaper sheets
  • 2 pieces of white paper (so the newsprint doesn't show through the fabric).
• Cut the fabric you've chosen (old pillow cases, tshirts, sheets, etc all work great!) to be about an inch larger than your cardboard, all the way around -- about 10x13 inches.
• Put the material on top of your stack and flip the whole thing over.
• Hot glue the material to the cardboard, pulling tight:
  • we (of course) ran out of hot glue about 1/2 way through and just safety pinned the material to the cardboard for the last two sides.  It worked just fine
• Cut two pieces of ribbon, so they wrap under the bulletin board.  Tape.
• For a more complicated bulletin board you can add more ribbons in either a square pattern or a diamond pattern but if you're doing this craft with children, two ribbons is plenty!
• Pin or glue your chosen decorations to the board
• Hot glue (or tie to safety pins) a piece of string so you can hang your board

Teens or adults can make much more intricate versions of the same project by adding more ribbons!

Notes and such can be stuck to the board with push pins - there are some really pretty pushpins you can find these days!

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