Mini Bulletin Board Makeover with Custom Pushpins

A few days ago, I did a mini project for the office that's helping keep me a little more organized. I gave a small bulletin board that used to hang in our DC apartment's kitchen a quick makeover and made some custom pushpins to go with it.  If you are a very observant reader, you might remember it was covered in dandelion fabric, which I actually thought was pretty, but it didn't fit with feel I'm going for in my office here.

Here's what it looked like:

To give it a new look, I pulled off the dandelion fabric and replaced it with a remnant of white fabric with gold abstract/wavy stripes I grabbed from my fabric stash.

I'm not going to go into detail about how I reupholstered the bulletin board since it's pretty self-explanatory, but the basic gist is that I laid the board facedown, cut a piece of fabric that was slightly larger than the bulletin board, pulled the edges to the back and stapled them to the backside of the frame with my staple gun. Really easy!

Now that that was done, I turned to the second part of this little project - making some custom pushpins!

I had some run-of-the-mill clear pushpins that I wanted to jazz up, so I dug through my craft drawer and discovered a little bag of small glass tiles in varying shades of green (I decided to only use the lightest minty green tiles for this project). Perfect! They captured the modern look I wanted for these guys.

I used a hot glue gun to add a dab of glue to the top of the pushpin and then placed the tile on it, holding it there for a few seconds while the glue set.

It took me about ten minutes to make 20ish of these custom pushpins, which I think sort of look like stud earrings, haha. I can't imagine they would work very well or be comfortable though!

I love the minty green next to the wavy gold stripes of the fabric.

Then I just propped up my newly made-over bulletin board against the wall on my desktop and was done! It was ready for use.

That little glass cup holds the extra pushpins and that pen cup is just a tin can I covered in chevron fabric years ago...I still love it!

This simple project took a mere hour or so of my time and made such a big impact on the look and function of that small area of my desk. I've already tacked on a few items for work (post-its, reminders, notes and a few handy phone numbers) and love how it keeps my desktop a little less cluttered. While a bulletin board may be utilitarian by nature, it doesn't have to look that way if you cover it in pretty fabric and add a few pretty glass tile pushpins!

Another thing I loved about this project? It cost me zero dollars. Zilch! I got creative with materials I had on hand and it turned out to be quite a lovely transformation. Hooray!

Curious about other projects from my office? Check these out:

• DIY desk with upholstered top
• DIY mousepad
• How to add Greek key trim using washi tape (it's on the desk top!)