Homemade Christmas 09: Last One!

To wrap up my posts on Christmas gifts, here's one for the boys! I made these blocks for Bradley, mostly, but also gave some as gifts. This was Brad's only Christmas present from Mom & Dad, so I wanted to give him lots and lots to stack!

I think I did too many, though. It took me hours and hours to make these, plus hours and hours of help from my sweet aunt and cousin. My sister, mom, and dad also donated some time and skills for this gift. Don't get me wrong--I LOVE how they turned out. It's just that now it seems like I spend forever picking them up all over the house every day. No really, that's a good thing. Both Miranda and Brad love to play with them. Brad's favorite thing to do is knock 'em down and Miranda favorite is to look at all the pictures and letters. Here is a picture of her making a "train" as she calls it. I hope these will be a favorite toy for a lot of years.


Here's some details if you want to make some:

You can buy blocks already cut and sanded, but they are expensive. (A local wood place I checked into would have cost $1/block, and craft stores didn't really even carry very many or any at all.)

Home Depot has a 2"x2"x8' furring strip for $2.32. I bought three of these, so yea--I made about 150 blocks! I should have bought a higher quality wood, though. (Jeremy suggest poplar wood, and I think it wouldn't have cost much more, either.) My dad cut these into blocks using his miter saw. Some of the blocks splintered a bit and some even ended up not square shaped, so I couldn't use a few of them--so definitely look into a harder wood like poplar.

Next, I sanded them using my mom's belt sander. There is no way I would have sanded that many blocks without a power tool, but if you just buy one piece of wood, maybe 50 blocks wouldn't be too bad to sand by hand...

After that, they were ready to finish! At this point, I still hadn't made up my mind completely about how I wanted them to look, and I played around with some paint, but decided I loved the look of Mod Podged pictures the most. I wanted to combine the beautiful look of this from Martha and still have letters on them like these from Homemade by Jill. So what I came up with is to cut out pictures from magazines for four of the sides and then letters/numbers on two opposing sides. I found a variety pack of alphabet stickers at Walmart for under $5 that made the letters/numbers easy and much neater than hand painting them.

So next I cut out billions of 2x2 squares. Okay, technically, I cut out 592 little squares. And they weren't exactly 2x2. Not to bore with details, just make sure, like my Dad did, when you cut them, that they will be sqare. (You have to account for the blade cutting away some of the wood). So what I did is traced a square onto cardstock that I used as my pattern for cutting out pictures, so that I knew it would exactly fit the blocks.

Next I Mod Podged all those little squares onto the blocks. Then I put the stickers on. Finally, I layed them all out in my basement (with windows open) and sprayed a sealer on them, turning them a few times to make sure all sides got a good coat of sealant. And finally, done! And well worth all the effort, I'd say.