Giant Family Scrabble

I was on pinterest earlier today and I came across this idea on THIS blog. Check it out to read detailed directions, and how to avoid some problems she encountered. It was super easy, the hardest part was prepping the wood. I happened to have all of the materials already at my house! LOVE free projects! I cut a 4x4 post {which is actually 3.5 x 3.5 in case you didn't know that-don't get me started on that!} into pieces about an inch thick. I picked a reference point on my saw, since it is too short of a distance to reach the built in measurements. Cut your pieces, and sand the edges nice and smooth, as well as the front.

Grab your mod podge! I put a coat on the face and all sides and then let it dry, just to seal the wood.

Ok, back up. In the tutorial she did this on her computer, but I just grabbed a piece of paper and started working with the names. Once I found one that worked, I counted how many blocks I would need. Put your thinking caps on, you don't need the same number of letters in all of your names because some of those letters will get double-use, but you don't know which ones until you pick your pattern, so do this first. I actually thought it wasn't going to work, or I was going to try to add the word "family" and see if that would make our names work without touching in the wrong places and making the names run together. You could add different words if yours don't work right alone. {family, love, home, your last name, etc.}

Here are my pieces drying from the mod podge. I didn't take a picture of me placing the vinyl on the blocks, because that's pretty self explanatory. ;) I cut my letters and tiny numbers the correct sizes using my silhouette software. If you don't have vinyl, you could use black paper instead. After placing the vinyl where I wanted it, I put a layer of mod podge on top of them to make sure they stick. Some of them didn't want to stick to the wood very well, because it's the rough edge of the wood. Mod podge did the trick.

After they dried again, I hot glued flat thumbtacks on the backs of them. Just use one in the center top of the back. I wasn't sure if one would work, but it worked perfectly. ;)

When hanging, I started with Emma, and grew out from there since hers was kind of the center name.

Here's a closer shot of the tiny "score" numbers. I think this is SO cute! I LOVE how it turned out!

I have a niece who is a photographer and she's always posting pics like this one on facebook and I always thought you had to have photoshop to do this, but today she posted one of their dinner while they were at dinner, so I knew there must be an app I didn't know about. I asked her and she said she uses a combination of diptic and instagram. Diptic was $1.99 and instagram was free. I quickly figured it out and {yay!} now I can make cute pictures! Thanks Bree! :)