I made the Handmade Pledge a few months ago, determined to either buy handmade presents, or make them myself. I didn’t want to scare myself away from the challenge by doing every present that way this year, so I settled for my nephew’s present. I made JT a set of alphabety blocks. He’s a bit young yet to be learning his ABCs, but he can still mess about with them now.
These are the papers that I used for the blocks. I cut them into 30x30mm squares to be glued on. I didn’t use all of them though, so now I have a big bag of squares left over and no project ideas coming to mind.
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The first few squares of Basic Grey’s Kettle cut, and ready for gluing. Only a couple of hundred or more to go!
Cutting the squares up took about two hours, I’m not the fastest in the world when it comes to wielding a pair of scissors. Soooo many of them, though!
We bought a length of untreated pine, 180cm long and 42x42mm squared. And I got my husband to cut about 40 cubes out of that, 42x42x42mm each. This is a raw, untreated block.
And here’s the majority of the untreated blocks, all ready for the final stages. But first! They needed to be sanded back, and the sharp edges taken off. I had cramps in my arms for an entire day afterwards.
I glued the squares on with PVA glue, after wiping the dust off with a slightly damp cloth to help them stick better. I wish I’d bought a wider range of card, but I think the one’s that I did buy were enough anyway. I used a red/gold card to spell out his name. Then I stuck the letters on.
A couple of the finished blocks, spelling out the first half of JT’s name. They’re rough, but then, they ARE handmade and we weren’t going for perfection here. We wanted them to look a little rough, anyway.
The finished product! We bought a plastic container and used some of the lefftover letters to put JT’s name on the lid. We put a lot of effort into this (my husband and I), and we’re quite chuffed with our first crafty project.
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