When we moved I bought a new desk from Argos (terrible quality, I know, but it was cheap), which came in quite a lot of packaging. I was looking at the box and all the polystyrene and wondering whether there was something I could make out of it when it hit me that it would be nice to have a pin board – partly to put things on and partly as something to fill up the large white blank walls in the new flat.

I made the actual pin board a little while ago but have only just got round to fixing it to the wall so I can finally write this post about it!

The polystyrene was all in strips to I had to fit all the pieces I had together like a jigsaw. Some of the pieces were thinner that other bits so I put some cardboard underneath to make the surface as even as I could.

I had an old pillow case (from a set of single bedding) which I cut up to cover the pin board. Annoyingly it wasn’t quite big enough to cover it in one piece so I covered it in 2 pieces. If I was to do this again, I would measure my fabric first and make the pinboard fit it (rather than the other way round), unless I had a really big piece of old fabric or bought some specially.

If I had a staple gun, I would have stapled the fabric on, but since I don’t and I was trying to make this completely for free, I used some tack which I had anyway (for fixing our broken chest of drawers) and tried to make the back look as neat as possible, though it doesn’t really matter too much.

This is it finished. I wish the fabric was a bit more straight on both sides, but we can’t all be perfect.

And this is it (finally) on the wall. I’m pretty pleased with it, considering it didn’t cost me anything! And it even works! There are things pinned on it!

So there we have it: some packaging I would have thrown out, an old pillow case, some glue, some tacks and voila, a pin board!

This is what it looks like now, with a few more things on it and some lights!