Last year for Christmas, I used tons of family photos (thank you social media) to put together a calendar that included everyone in my extended family. Because we’re a pretty big (fun and rowdy) clan,  I was able to use a different family for each month and included everyone’s birthdays. It was a hit! When this Christmas season rolled around, I wanted to come up with another idea for the family, and came across customized coasters.

I thought this would be another great way to incorporate family photos, and in a way that is useful too! Plus, it didn’t seem too difficult, which is good, considering I tend to mess up even the easiest of projects.

Now the work begins. Easy, fun work compared to some of the other stuff we were working on, so it was a nice change of pace. I should also probably mention that while I was working on these, Dan and I were also tackling the end of the coat rack project (link), in the middle of refinishing a filing cabinet (link) and just starting our checkerboard table war (link) (more on that later!). You could only imagine what my parent’s basement and garage looked like…

But anyway…First thing’s first – I took the tile, wiped off any dust, painted a thick coat of Mod Podge on, and then placed the picture on the tile.

I let that settle, and then covered the top of the picture in another layer of Mod Podge. I panicked for a minute, because it looks like glue and when you first apply it, its all white and filmy. But never fear, it does indeed dry clear.

Next was the felt. I bought 2 yards of black felt and started cutting into squares that were slightly smaller than 4 inches.

When I realized that this would be awfully time consuming (and that I couldn’t cut a straight line for the life of me) I remembered that my mom used to sew and work alot with fabric, and that she must have something I could use. Low and behold, she had a fabric cutter, cutting board, and ruler. Safe to say this made things a whole lot easier.

After cutting the squares, all I had to do was use the fabric glue to stick it to the bottom of each tile. This kept the tile from scratching whatever coffee table the coaster makes its home on.

When all was said and done, I had 75 tiles scattered across my basement. But there was no way I could get away with spraying that much acrylic finisher without the smell filling the house. So, one by one (just kidding), we carried the tiles into the garage and laid them flat against the ground. Dan helped spray even layers of acrylic across all of the tiles.This spray makes the tiles water/spill proof, so we added an extra layer, juuuuust in case.

I wrapped each set of coasters in a bow, and these beauties were ready for Christmas.

It feels good to be able to bring a smile to my family’s face and to do something nice for them, as they’ve all done so much for me. I may run out of creative gift ideas eventually, but will never run out of the amount of gratitude I have for each and every one of them.