Playroom wall display

Why not turn your art display space into a piece of art in its own right?



As we don't have a traditional fridge door to display baby's artwork on We decided we needed a display board in our playroom. I did some idea hunting on Pinterest and in the end decided to opt for a whiteboard. But a plain whiteboard is so boring, so I decided to frame ours to make it a piece of art in its own right. You can do this with so many different materials (wood, plastic etc) but I was captured by the versatility and low cost of cardboard. For inspiration with cardboard frames see my Pinterest board

Have a hunt around online, we found a large whiteboard at a great price via Amazon.

We started with the empty whiteboard box and cut the box down into a basic frame shape. 

To give the frame some texture I then overlayed it with corrugated card. I cheated an bought a roll of corrugated packing card from eBay (£4.99 for 10 meters), but you can actually peel your own card if you want to keep costs down and you'll get a more rustic look (tips on how here). I also cut out a decorative top piece from some spare box card. For speed We then sprayed whole thing with acrylic spray paint (Hobbycraft) but you can use a few coats of bottled squeezy paint. 

The decorations for the frame are mostly recycled materials: More bits of corrugated card cut into leaf & butterfly shapes, the card insides of toilet rolls cut into thin sections (to make flowers), and old buttons and beads, all spray painted gold (this time with enamel paint to work on the metal & plastic beads). The cord is furniture dressing cord (bought from Hobbycraft) and I used about 5 meters. The butterfly's are finished off with a top layer of cream card and tied together with string. The whole thing is then stuck together with a hot glue gun.

For mounting the frame onto the whiteboard we used self adhesive magnetic tape, which means if we want to change things in future we can just in-magnet it leaving no damage underneath. 

Tips: 

• Test your chosen spray paints on a spare bit of card to make sure they don't make the card go soggy. It's better to build up layers than have things soggy and lose the lovely corrugations. 
• You can do whatever colour combinations you like, but I found that even with the gold paint the cardboard middles don't look like they've been painted unless you catch them in the right light.