Ribbon Display Board

Over the years, I have collected quite a lot of ribbons from various quilt shows. I used to hang them all on the door to my studio space, but since moving downstairs into our finished basement, I no longer have a door and the ribbons had been languishing in a bin.

I'm rather proud of a few of these, so I really wanted to be able to enjoy them. After thinking about it for a while, and several failed solutions involving command hooks pulling paint off my wall, I decided that I needed a bunch of hooks that I could hang the ribbons off of. Enter the ribbon display board! Here's a rundown on exactly how I made mine in case you want to make one for your own ribbons, whether they be for your quilts, your horses, or anything else that earns ribbons.

Step one was to get a nice board and some stain from Lowe's. If you've ever tried to find a nice, non-warped board at Lowe's, you know that succeeding in that deserves a ribbon in and of itself. I also purchased some wood stain, and I decided that since my logo has purple in it, I was going to be wild and try the purple wood stain. My conversation about having it mixed went kind of like this:

Me: I'd like this in violet, please.

Paint mixer: Of course! You said, uhhh... violet, right?

Me: You say that like you don't get many people wanting that one.

Paint mixer: Yeah, I think this is the first time I've been asked for that one.

You'll also want some pre-stain treatment and a polyurethane finish to keep it looking nice.

This was my first foray into staining wood, and I did learn to go in small sections and wipe with my rags as quickly as possible. The end result is not perfect, but this was a great way to try out staining because it will mostly end up covered by the ribbons anyway!

Honestly, I think that the purple stain is pretty nice. It's just a really subtle little bit of color.

After it was all dry, it was time to mark where all the hooks would go. I used a paint marker and one of those handy quilting rulers to mark them. I wanted to fit as many ribbons as I could, and I didn't care if they were going to overlap since some of them are nicer than others anyway, so those will go on the bottom. I put a row of dots on the top and the bottom, with the two rows offset and 2 inches between the dots in each row.

After marking the holes, I predrilled a little ways into the board to make my hooks easier to screw in. I used these ones from Amazon. They are vinyl coated and I found using a pair of flat pliers worked best to protect their finish and my fingers!

After that, it sat for a while until we figured out where to put it up. We decided that my initial spot for it was too risky because we knew there were some pipes behind the drywall and I really, really didn't want to drill through any pipes! Eventually we decided on a set where we knew there was just wood beam behind it, and drilled some hanging holes through the wood and into the wall. And here it is before ribbons were hung (and before all the screws were screwed in, too, because they turned out to be pretty hard to screw in).

After that came the fun part: putting up all the ribbons! Because they had been sitting in a box for quite a while, many of them were a little crumpled up so the first order of business was to give them a gentle press from the back with a warm (low setting) iron. After that, it was time to hang them. Different ribbons have different hanging hardware attached; the easiest one were the ones that already had a string. I just re-knotted those lower down to make the loop of the string shorter.

For the others, I cut short lengths of ribbon and knotted it to make a loop, then I attached the loops to the ribbons by either hooking them over existing hanging hardware, or stapling them to the cardboard if there was no hanging hardware. Only the ones from my local guild's show had none of those, so I'm going to have to hand-tack the loops to the back... which might take a while to get around to.