Scrabble Living Large: Family Names Art Project

 
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This is a project that I have been working on for a year....  because everything gets better with age, like cheese and stuff right??  Or because, that is how I do crafty projects... i.e. I never finish them!

BUT I had some great motivation with this awesome Silhouette SD giveaway we are having and I decided it was time to finish it (like in the last 5 minutes...)!  And it was the perfect time to add another member to our family game!

When I first started this project I had some problems, and I think I can help you to avoid them in part!

Supplies:
A 2" x 2" or 4" x 4"
Vinyl lettering (could use paper, or paint if not available!)
Modpodge (satin finish if you can get it) or Polycrylic finish

Tools:
Silhouette SD machine ("Ahhh" can you hear that?  the heavens are singing...)
Miter saw (or hand saw, a mitering box and A LOT of patience!)

Okay first on a piece of paper, or in a spreadsheet on the computer you are going to have to figure out the layout of your family names.  This can be fun and frustrating.  When I started last year and we only had the three names I thought it would be fun to add the word Family too.  So, if you have to add some adjectives or other nouns in there that works too!

Here are some of the options I came up with:

You need to decide on a good thickness to cut you scrabble tiles.  I did mine at 3/4 of and inch, for a 4" x 4" that I had left over from our headboard project.  You simply cut these slices from your wood, but be careful, Remodelaholic is not liable for your injuries...

In order to get uniform pieces it may be easiest to set up a 1/2 inch or 3/4 stop and then you simply push your wood through to the stop and cut, cut, cut!  That way you don't have to remeasure every time.  A stop looks something like the image below only in our case a lot closer to the blade.  For your safety you do not want to handle the small piece that you are cutting off until it had been cut and the blade has been moved away.

I found a little video on a wood working site that explains stops if you have a question about it.  ** On the video he uses a really tall piece of wood, that isn't necessary in this case, and may get in the way of the saw blade, just FYI.

(source)

Okay, now the cool part about using a 4x4 cut into slices is that you get to see the rings for the wood.  I think it adds some interest.  And if you look at little scrabble tiles they have this grain too, although maybe not the full rings... but anyway.

After you've made the cuts your edges are a little ragged and need to be sanded down to clean up the edge.

Now you have your perfect tiles ready to be painted (optional) and sealed.  The wood I had was dark, and I wanted the letters to pop, so I did a light wash of white acrylic paint to even out the tone and make the letter stand out.

In previous attempts, I learned the hard way that not sealing the wood first will result in vinyl or stickers of any sort from sticking, and you will get bubbles and wrinkles and basically one hot mess.  So, seal front and back your tiles if you are using vinyl.  I choose to use Mod-podge since I was pregnant and didn't want to fume up my house.

But also, I didn't have black vinyl... no problem I used my Silhouette machine to cut out black cardstock and mod-podged it on there...  (the lighting for this picture is bad, the tiles doesn't actually look that white)

Add letters with modpodge and lightly go over the whole tile. ( you can see it drying in the image below...)

In order to hang these on the wall I just hot glued some push pins to the back of the "tile", and pushed them in place into my drywall...  Now the only problem, I am not really sure where I am planning on using these, so for now I just made a million new holes in our wall!  I think these would be really fun in a game room - i wish I had one, don't you?

Oh, and did you notice?  Instead of the numbers across the bottom of Justin's tiles I wrote "Family"  Look really close!

What do you think?

And while doing research for this project I came upon the image below... you could make that it a snap!  And with the money you saved you could take me out to dinner and really nice steak dinner, I'm just sayin' is all.

(source)

I guess that the company Posh Tots used to sell this for a cool (cough) $500 doll hairs...

Can you believe it?  Yikes!

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