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This week, Spoonflower designer Heather Dutton of Hang Tight Studio shares an easy but impactful magnet board makeover using Spoonflower decals. Read on for the details of Heather’s project, including some extra ideas for using up leftover decal bits at the end of the post! (Note: Spoonflower no longer sells wall decals, but you can recreate this project with our Peel & Stick wallpaper.)


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When the New Year rolls around, I love tidying up my studio and starting the year off with a fresh space. One thing I desperately needed this year was a special place to hold my to-do lists and reminders since my bulletin boards are jam-packed with new designs I’m working on and inspiration images.

I bought a boring office supply magnet board over the holidays but it looked like something that belonged in a boardroom instead of an art studio.

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So I decided to give it a little help thanks to Spoonflower’s fab wall decals! The whole makeover was easy-peasy! The hardest part of the process was deciding which design to use. Seriously!
There are so many fun patterns to choose from but I kept coming back
to “Old Technology” by Michelle Luu (aka, Theboutiquestudio on Spoonflower). I love the retro vibe of her design and the vintage phones, cameras and typewriters seemed like a perfect fit for a message center.

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I started off by measuring the length and width of the inside of the board (the magnetic bit) so I’d know what size to cut the decal.

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The decals come with a pre-cut easy peel edge that’s inset a little bit from the outside edge of the paper. This is a great feature but I needed a raw edge to start my measurements from so I trimmed my decal down just inside the pre-cut edge on two sides.

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I flipped the decal over (to the paper side) and, using a T-square on my new raw edge, I measured out the height and width of my board on the back with a pencil. Using a sharp X-Acto blade, I cut the decal to fit my dimensions.

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I decided that I wanted to put a small band of my own “Off The Grid” design at the bottom of my board so I cut the main decal a little shorter than the board, measured the extra space for my second decal, and cut that piece to fit as well. Once my pieces were cut, I peeled off the backing and stuck them to the inside of the board. Crazy easy!

Photo 7I had a couple of decal scraps left over and I couldn’t bear to throw them away so I decided why not go crazy and make a handy pen and paper holder and some coordinating magnet clips? You could use just about anything for a pen/paper holder as long as you can glue a couple of magnets to the back of it. I cut one of the “Old Technology” decal scraps to fit this fun metal tin I had laying around, slapped it on, glued a few magnets to the back and bam!  Instant coordinating pen and paper holder! Nobody’s going to see the back of the tin so I didn’t worry about making it look pretty.

Photo 8I’m a bit of a sucker for clothespins so it was a no-brainer to turn a few into coordinating magnet clips! I just traced the shape of the clothespin onto the back of my decal scrap and cut them to fit. I did the same thing for the magnet strip (which is super-easy to cut). The magnet strips are self-adhesive but I used a little glue just to make sure they stayed on. Ta da!!! Your very own coordinating clothespin magnet clips! Wheee!

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A big thanks to Spoonflower & Michelle Luu at Theboutiquestudio for the brilliant decals and fun project!