DIY , No-Sew Desk Skirt

Yesterday afternoon, I was cleaning the house like crazy because we had people coming over for dinner. I was trying to catch up on all of the things I've been neglecting for months, like mopping the floors (babies need a clean floor to play on!)  I looked around our living room and thought; not for the first time; how unsightly the tv cords are sticking out from under the desk the tv is sitting on. Let's just face it: electrical cords are unruly things that just do what they want; even if you try to bring some semblance of order to them by tying them together they still somehow manage to look completely messy. I'm sure you've thought this before too, if you have cords lying around.

See? Ugly.



 And of course my sweet Eliana, being the little explorer that she is, will see the red light on the power strip and decide to switch it on and off and on and off. Not good for the electronics. Of course, her getting electrocuted wouldn't be good either!
 I needed a solution, and quickly! I thought about using fabric and velcro-ing the fabric around the inside base of the desk but alas, I didn't have any velcro lying around and  I was determined not to spend any money on this project.
I went to my fabric stash and found this lovely little number-just the perfect thing! I've had it for a while- it was a $5.00 thrift store find and have been waiting for an opportunity to use it.  (the picture is a little blurry because I laid the fabric across the rocking chair to take the picture and Eliana decided she should get in the chair and rock...so this is taken between rocking back and forth. )

Cool pattern, huh?

But how to attach it to the desk??

Thumbtacks. Yep! I have a ton of them. Well, not literally a ton. Could you imagine? Where would you put them all? Anyway... I have a lot of thumbtacks in a cute little metal mesh container.

Here's what I did:

Basically I just  folded the fabric so that the selvedge edges of the fabric were together ( that's the part with the designer's name or some numbers or something on it that comes from the fabric making place- see above.) and tacked it up far enough under the desk that it would look nice. Then I just tacked all around!

Simple. Fast. Easy! And I love it!

Guess who forgot to iron the fabric beforehand?? oops.

One tip- if you want to make this a little easier on yourself, you might want to take everything off the desk/piece of furniture and turn it upside down so you aren't laying on your back, craning your neck to see where to put the tacks. Or, if you're like me, you just say, "what the heck? I'm gonna be lazy and just do it this way!" and use the aforementioned method.

I ended up tacking the fabric to the back legs too, for extra crisp edges. Unfortunately, the front legs were all curvy and would've looked weird and made the fabric all bunchy. (is that a word?) so I left them out. I still think it turned out okay though. If you're less pinched for time and have more patience I imagine you could actually measure the length of fabric you'll need and cut and hem the bottom edge, but I just pooled it around under the desk. It isn't  a perfect rectangle, but the pooling adds some nice weight and helps deter little hands from looking to see what treasures might be awaiting under there.

Here it is!

I really like how it turned out, and the best part is, it only took about 10 minutes! I did hold up the iron to those huge wrinkles and get them out a little bit so that it looks more smooth..just forgot to take a picture of it. :)
Do you have any quick DIY projects you've done lately? I"d love to hear about them and see what you're up to!