Hearth Handmade: Little Man Accessory Board

Back in late 2012 I was in nesting and mode preparing for the arrival of my son, due in early February 2013. At the time we were living in our old house in California and I went to town decorating his nursery. Stampington & Company actually featured my sons nursery in a blog post which you can read about here.

There were a number of thrift store finds and simple DIY projects in the nursery. When we moved to Utah I sold a lot of our furniture so I no longer have the dresser and rocking chair (tears because I badly wanted to restore those), and he now sleeps in a big boy bed so his bedroom has changed a lot. I have held onto a lot of the DIY projects though, and one of my favorites are these framed pieces of fabric.

One thing that you will usually find a lot of at thrift stores are frames. They are so easy to redo with a little paint and minimal supplies. I wanted to do a small gallery wall of frames in various sizes so I chose a bunch of totally random frames. Some still had glass and some didn't, I just tossed the glass in the trash. I spray painted all the frames a solid white with a matte finish.

I used recycled cardboard from old boxes (after my baby shower I had a lot of excess cardboard boxes) and cut the pieces to size to fit each frame. I picked up a bunch of fun fabric swatches to use and then cut the pieces all to size to match the frame they were going in. You could glue the fabric onto the cardboard but that gets a little messy so I just stretched it over each piece of cardboard then secured it at the back with a little glue, and then tape. Not the most professional method but hey - it worked and projects like this are usually only temporary for me. In a year I will probably re purpose the frames into a different project.

These frames hung on the wall in my sons bedroom as is for quite some time. Recently after unpacking from our move from California to Utah I pulled them out of a box and decided to give them more of a purpose.

I saw an idea on Pinterest a few years ago where someone had created a framed board with fabric in it and used it to display accessories for a little boy (bow ties and that sort of thing). So I decided to used one of the larger frames in a similar fashion.

I suggest just using sewing pins to attach the accessories to the boards. That way it isn't permanent. Since the backing is cardboard, everything pinned on really easily. Its probably best to used pins without a pearl head like I did, that's all I had on hand. The pins without a head would be less visible. Whatever you use, just keep the frames out of reach from your little ones..