AuralArtists: Heartfelt Coasters

This month all four of us finished our Paint Chip Challenge! Hooray! I drew the inspiration for my project from these mosaic greeting cards by Chica and Jo. But instead of greeting cards, I decided to make tile coasters.

I began by purchasing a new craft tool. This is a one-inch heart-shaped paper punch from Martha Stewart's craft collection. I found it was too large for the standard several-shades-on-one-card paint chips, so I used the larger size chips and was able to punch about 10 hearts from each card. I chose tones of cranberry and forest green to compliment my home's color scheme.

Once I cut out the hearts, I played with them to create a pleasing pattern on my plain white 4-inch tiles. I decided to make all four coasters in the same colorway. Luckily, I had some tiles left over from a home improvement project, so I didn't need to buy them.

I used "Super Gloss-Brilliant" Mod Podge to adhere the paint chips to the tiles. I wanted the finished product to be nice and shiny so that they still looked like tiles with a high-gloss finish. I found this formula of Mod Podge at Walmart for around five dollars.

I started with a thick-ish layer of Mod Podge on the tile, then pressed the hearts into it. I then added another layer of Mod Podge over the hearts. Then I smoothed out the globs of the glue to the best of my ability so that the finished product would be as flat as possible. I found that the paint chips didn't want to lie flat. So every time they started to curl up, I used the wood end of my sponge brush to push them flat again.

[Like this fuzzy action shot?]

I let the pieces dry for a couple hours, then added another layer of Mod Podge. I used four layers altogether. With each layer, I applied the glue in a different direction:

top to bottom
right to left
bottom to top
left to right

The finished tiles have a cross-hatch look to the finish which you can see clearly if you look at the top of the hearts on the tiles from this angle.

.
Next, I used some felt adhesive dots to keep the backs of the tiles from scratching the tabletop. These are the thick felt dots found at a hardware store that you can adhere to the bottom of furniture legs to make moving heavy furniture easy and keep it from scratching a wood floor. Luckily, I had some of these left over too.

Using five pads on the back keeps each tile quite stable. The felt pads raise the tiles off the table like this:

.
I'm so pleased with the final result! If I were to change one thing, it might be to paint the sides of the tiles and cover them with Mod Podge, too. That would give the coasters a completely finished appearance.