DIY: Painted Cork Squares

This project was super easy and fun! My friend Sarah from Laughs, Crafts & Photographs was over and helped me with this simple but adorable project! Check out her blog for a step-by-step post with high quality pictures!

What You Need:

I found everything I needed at Michael's Craft Store for a little over $20. The most expensive item was the cork squares themselves. I bought them in a pack of 4 for about $16. Next you will need some sort of acrylic paint and brushes. I bought 2 foam brushes (medium size) and I also ended up using a circular foam brush that I had at home already. The brushes were about $1 for two. The paint I bought was Craft Smart acrylic paint and it was under $1 per bottle. I bought colors that would match with my room and the scrapbook paper I bought for my weekly dry erase calendar. I bought a pale blue, purple, light green, and two bottles of white. Although you don't need them, I also bought stencils because my artistic abilities are not that great lol. The pack had chevron and polka dot patterns among a few others. It was $6 for the stencils but they will be able to be reused!

How:

First we painted the cork squares completely. We painted two squares white and then one we painted blue and one purple. We let those dry for a while (didn't take long, paint dries fairly quickly on cork) and then we used the stencils. I used the chevron stencil and green paint over one of the white cork squares and the white paint and polka dot stencil over the blue square. It was a little tricky to line up the stencil once you reached the end but you could easily line up the stencil with the last row you painted and continue from there. 

            

Here is the finished product! It was super easy to do and now I'll have some fun cork boards to hang things up on. I'm thinking of using them to hang printables and one cork square will be used as my "motivation board"! I'll be blogging about how I ended up using these very soon! Only a few more weeks until Fall semester!