DIY Personalized Cutting Boards

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This DIY is brought to your by your local fire department and oven mitt retailers: wood-burning is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who get distracted half-way through a craft and forget to unplug their wood-burner. Mamas, this is a naptime craft for sure.

I tried this idea out since it's Christmastime and I have friends who have given me thoughtful, handmade gifts while I'm over here like the shrugging emoji girl as I hand them a giftcard. BUT NOT THIS YEAR. You could turn this DIY into a gift basket by adding cheese, crackers, a bottle of wine, & a gift basket to hold it all. (No one would even know it was a last-minute gift! No waiting for things to arrive from online shopping...just a simple DIY gift basket with a personalized touch.)

What you need:

• An hour or so
• Wood-burning tool
• Wood-burning alphabet
• This $4 cutting board, or you could get fancy with this $20 serving tray
• A pencil & ruler (for text layout)
• An oven mitt and random bakeware (to hold the hot letters between uses)

What to do: 

1. Lay out what you want to woodburn on the cutting board. Make sure to measure the distance between lines of text. Or, if you're not using the alphabet stamps and you want to free-hand it, then DEFINITELY pencil your design on there. I jotted down little markers for where each line of text was supposed to start. 
2. Pull out all the letters you're going to use and line them up so they're ready to go. 
3. Put the first letter on the woodburning tool and wait a few minutes for it to heat up. 
4. After a few minutes, press the tool onto your cutting board with medium pressure. Count to 3 and pick it up. If the letter is too faint, CAREFULLY line it up and push it on again for another 3 seconds. 
5. Turn the tool off, wait 2-3 minutes, and then use the oven mitt to unscrew the letter from the tool and screw on the next letter. DO NOT TRY TO UNSCREW THE LETTER FROM THE TOOL RIGHT AWAY OR YOU WILL BURN A HOLE IN YOUR OVEN MITT. Not that I know this from experience. 
6. Keep the still-hot letter on your bakeware.
7. Repeat this until your message is completely burned on the cutting board!

The process of heating up a letter, using it, cooling it, removing it, and heating up the next letter DOES take a while. However, I finished this cutting board in about an hour and listened to a Christmas episode of The Popcast With Knox and Jamie while I did this!

Here are the wood-burning things I used:

Have you ever tried woodburning? What fun projects have you done recently?