Scrabble Coasters

Im bringing together my love of board games and weird obsessions with coaster in this DIY. I found this project on Pinterest but have never seen them made. I am in love with the final product.

For this project you will need:

• scrabble letters ( I ordered a bag of 100 off of Amazon for $7)
• 1/4 inch thick cork board
• E6000 craft adhesive
• finishing spray or mod podge
• exacto knife

Once you have all your supplies your going to use your letters to create four letter words. Each coaster is going to have four words, so your coaster will be a total of 16 tiles.

After you have your words laid out you can start glueing them to the cork board. I started by putting a small strip of glue for the word I wanted at the bottom of my coaster. Then I worked from the bottom right corner ending at the top left corner of my coaster, once I finished glueing my top word. So basically I glued my letters as if I was reading my coaster backwards.

After you have glued down all your letter you can move to the next corner of the cork board to let your first coaster set before trimming the edges.

 

Once you have glued all your letters down and the glue has set you can trim the edge off. When trimming the edges of the cork, it works best to make several shallow cuts to make sure your actually cutting the cork and not ripping it. To make sure they are water proof and have a nice finish I sprayed mine with clear finishing spray. I got a gloss so they would have a nice shiny finish. I sprayed them with about four thin coats and it created a nice gloss sealed finish. You could probably skip this step but I think it adds that extra over the top edge to them. The spray brought out the grain in the wood and made them look more vibrant.

Overall I am very happy with how these turned out. It was a simple and quick project that I will definitely will be doing again. Unfortunately I could only make two of these coasters because I made the mistake of only ordering 100 letter tiles. When I was ordering my supplies I thought that 100 was a lot but they only give you a limited amount of each letter so I am going to order more letters to make more.

Learn from my mistakes
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• The glue is slightly difficult to work with so I found it was best to put my strip of glue on the cork and let it set for about a minute. This allowed it to get slightly tacky making the letters slide around less.
• Like I already said, I should of ordered more letters. I tried to create somewhat of a theme to the words on my coasters and I just didn’t have the letters I needed after I made two coaster.

Tips
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• Use the corner of the cork board as a guide to keep the letter straight.
• If you plan to make a set of coasters that all say the same thing make sure in advance to have enough of each letter.
• The coaster was smaller than a store bought coaster I have so you could definitely make them with five words that have five letters.