Gotta Love Crafty Sunday Brunches

Challenge 36- DIY Tile Coasters, two attempts with varying degrees of success

One of my favorite people, who I don't see enough, came down for brunch this Sunday. When we were planning for this visit I said we needed to do a craft while she was here. This is the same friend who did the melted crayon art project with me back in August. She told me she already had all of the supplies to try two DIY coaster projects and she would bring them with her. After consuming way to many blueberry pancakes and oven baked bacon (thank you Martha Stewart), we got to work.

The first set of coasters were going to use alcohol ink to make a tie-dyed type look on the coaster. This project calls for all of the ingredients below.

Supplies were bought at Michaels and Home Depot

You take the paint brush and brush on a thin (but not too thin) coat of alcohol onto the tile. You then choose what color alcohol inks you want and start dropping little drops on the tile and watch the alcohol ink meld together in pretty cool patterns.

Mine are the two if the foreground and M's are the one's in the back

A few lessons learned from this is go slow, only use small drops, and make sure you have a good coating of alcohol on the tile. You can tell from the one in the back right what they look like when you don't use enough alcohol. We let these dry for about and hour and then M took them outside to spray with the Rust-Oleum Matte Clear sealer. 

Now to finish these you are supposed to paint the sides of the tile to cover the white and add pads to the bottom to keep them from scratching furniture. M had to leave before the sealer was completely dry so technically these aren't totally complete.

I would recommend two coats of sealer as a few scratches ended up on one of them. These are cool and could be customized with different colors, but still didn't come out quite as nice as the original pin.

The second set of coasters used a more natural stone tile, Mod Podge, and scrapbook paper. These are pretty straight forward. Put Mod Podge on the tile, stick down what ever scrapbook paper you like (cut to the size of the tile), seal the top of the scrapbook paper with more Mod Podge and let it dry. Finish them off with a spray of Rust-Oleum Matte Clear sealer.

Since the tile was natural stone I went pretty liberal with the glue

Fun chevron print (still wet)

 M decided to make her's a bit fancier than mine.

The tiles she bought from came in a pack of eight and five were broken, so we were only able to finish three of this style.

These were even easier than the ink ones (and way less messy), but again they still don't look as nice as the original pin. With a little practice and good scrapbook paper this is a good craft to do as a gift for someone and would be pretty easy for a slightly older kid (maybe 2nd grade and up) to do for a Mother's Day gift or a birthday present for a relative. These were fun to try and were not a fail, but I only be consider them a moderate success.