shamelessly stolen tutorial

first tutorial post ever...yay! huge disclaimer: this idea was 100% borrowed from NiceGirlNotes and her original post can be seen here. she's mad cool. now on to the tutorial: Cute Magnets for My "Niece"

my gorgeous cousin Lindsey is having a baby girl in Jan and I have the distinct honor of helping her get the nursery ready. so excited to meet my new second cousin (though we're just calling her my niece because it gets really complicated otherwise). and Lindsey, being an awesome soon-to-be mom has chosen a rad color scheme - light and dark purple with bright orange. i was skeptical too, but it's looking awesome so far.

so...taking a huge creativity note from Roo (via NiceGirlNotes), I decided to make a tri-color magnet set for Reece. I got some wooden discs (2" in diameter to meet child safety standards) and 3 sample jars of paint from Lowes. Then, I divided the total pieces by three and painted them front and back with two coats each.

notice my was-once-pretty-blue-and-gold-but-is-now-really-faded rug? fancy, i know

Once dry, I put black scrapbook letter stickers on the front of each piece. I know in the original tut, she used rub-on letters but that seemed too time consuming so I went straight for peel & stick. Important note: make sure you are using letters with a standard font...a child-recognizable alphabet is more important than cute on this point. Then, I used a tiny bit gorilla glue (crazy strong stuff) to adhere magnets to the back of each disc. Another important note: when buying craft magnets, make sure to check the strength, I had to do a little searching but I ended up using #3 strength. #1 won't hold the discs to a surface and #6 seemed a too strong for little hands...plus, the too strong ones had a snapping-together quality that made me worry about pinched fingers.

obviously a stellar quality photo. sorry!

The finished set included 26 regular uppercase letters, numbers 0-9, and a second letter for A, I, O, D, as well as 2 additional Es. I would've done another U but I wanted to make sure she'd be able to spell out her name. And I love that someday she'll be able to use the three colors as a sorting activity too.

Reece Isabella...I cannot wait to meet you!

Final step: I used modge podge to seal the letters to the front of each disc...no peeling up stickers here! And an fyi, for any other over-zealous crafters out there, once I had all the materials, this project only took one day to complete. Well, that's all...leave a comment if you have any questions. I hope you like them!