I wanted to show you just one of the gifts I made for friends and family this year. My daughter and her boyfriend have a magnetic white board in their bedroom. They write fun notes to each other and have a few plastic magnetic alphabet letters on it. When I saw it I thought it would be fun to make a bunch of scrabble tiles magnetic so they could play a fun game on it, leave love notes or whatever he wants.
While out Goodwill Hunting in the past I had gotten lucky enough to come across, on different occasions, two complete scrabble games and snatched them up. Can you believe I only paid $1.99 for them?
I pulled one of them out and got started.
When I made the decision to make this gift I bought magnets that come in a long strip rolled up. Cheaper than buying packages of 6 tiles. I would have bought a crap load of packages. Much more economical this way.
Got my glue gun out, fired it up and got started. This process isn't rocket science. I just took my trusty Tim Holtz scissors and started cutting about 1/2" snips off and piled them up. These magnates are self adhesive on one side but I could tell it just wasn't going to be strong enough so that is why I am hot gluing the magnets on the underside of each tile.
Once I got all the tiles done then I thought what? What am I going to put them in - What kind of storage or gift box should I put these in?
Then it came to me. I got a great idea!!!!!
Make a box out of the game board. What the heck was I going to do with it anyway.
I opened up the game board and decided a 5" square box would be perfect.
I figured the top of the box would measure 5" square and the sides would be a inch high on all 4 sides. I first cut all my sides. I wanted to make sure the main part of the box, the top, used the main portion of the board.
Dimensions:
4 sides: 1" wide and 5" long
The middle: 5 x 5 inch square.
Cutting through this thick board is darn tough so make sure you have a very nice sharp box cutter. Once I got all my pieces cut I also lightly sanded them. It had rough edges from cutting so I just took my sanding block and sanded two or three times along all the sides.
Lastly I glued all the sides to the middle.
Whether this is the top or the bottom of the box, the top is always a 1/2" wider on all sides. So since my bottom box measured 5 inch square I cut the top at 5 1/2" square and the sides for the top measure 1" wide and 5 1/2" long. The box needs to be the 1/2" wider so that it will slide over the bottom. Very scientific huh? LOL
Now the last dilemma was what do I put on the top. Something like a knob to open it with? No no no.. to plain. If he was into some kind of cartoon character or super hero then that would be a way to go.. glue one on top, but he isn't. This stumped me for a while and then...
TAAAA DAAAAAA
Again it came to me. Actually it was staring me right in front of my face. Glue tiles on top and make his name out of the tiles. Remember how I said I bought two games? So I broke into the other and picked out the tiles for his name. I also picked out the same number of just random ones so that I could glue them on top of each other. This way it stuck up higher and he could get ahold of them to use them as a handle to open it with.
I hope he liked it. (fingers crossed)
No comments:
Post a Comment