How to Make A 'Scrabble' Tile Pendant

	Wood Scrabble Pendant Tiles Rectangle 18x20mm /100 SKU: BWD-9001 $11.99
	Natural Wood Square Collage Jewelry Pendant Tiles 25mm (1 Inch) 24 Tiles SKU: BWD-9000 $10.99
	Nunn Design Glue Adhesive 2 oz. - For Patera Findings (1 pcs) SKU: XTL-1031 $17.49
	Gel Du Soleil UV Epoxy Dimensional Gloss for Crafts & Jewelry 0.3 Fl. Oz. SKU: XTL-1017 $12.99
	Gel Du Soleil UV Epoxy Dimensional Gloss for Crafts & Jewelry 4 Fl. Oz. SKU: XTL-1016 $81.89
	Mod Podge Gloss All-In-One Decoupage Sealer / Glue / Finish (4 fl. oz. ) SKU: XTL-1041 $6.59
	Fiskars 5 Precision Tip Scissors - Super Sharp SKU: XTL-5700 $7.45
	ICE Resin Jewelers Grade Clear Casting Epoxy Resin 8 oz Kit SKU: TRC-10 $37.29
	Jeweller's Micro-Flame Butane Torch Self Igniting Refillable 6 Inch SKU: XTL-0300 $46.94
	Beadalon Beading Mats - Prevent Bead Rolling 12 x 9 Inch (Set of 3) SKU: XTL-9930 $3.99
	Aanraku, Glue-On Pendant Bails, Small, Silver Plated (10 Pieces) SKU: FCO-4220 $7.99
	Aanraku, Glue-On Pendant Bails, Small, Gold Plated (10 Pieces) SKU: FCO-4230 $8.99
	Aanraku, Glue-On Pendant Bails, Small, Gold Plated (10 Pieces) SKU: FCO-4235 $8.99
	Aanraku, Heart Shaped Glue-On Pendant Bails, Small, Silver Plated (10 Pieces) SKU: FCO-4240 $7.99
	E6000 Industrial Strength Glue Adhesive (1 Oz) SKU: XTL-1051 $6.99

Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Thank you for joining us here at Beadaholique.com. This is Julie. Today I'm going to teach you how to make Scrabble tile pendants. Here are a few examples of some pendants which have yet to put their bail on. You can see that there's a wide array of choices you have in terms of your image and graphics. A few of these use transfers others use collage images and here's the completed one with the little bail attached to the back. So to begin with we will have to gather supplies we here at Beadaholique.com sell these great one-inch square wood blanks. You can tell that they're a little bit larger than the scrabble tile which i actually like because it gives me more room to see my design and my embellishments. But if you have scrabble tiles on hand feel free to use them. They work great too. You're going to need a white glue. We are using the Nunn Design glue but any white craft glue is going to do. You're going to need some Mod Podge as well and a pair of scissors and that's all you're going to need at this point as we prepare to get our images onto our tiles. If you using a inkjet printer just be aware that the ink can bleed. So it's best to use a laser printer. You can usually go down to your neighborhood office supply store and print a sheet of images for around fifty cents a copy. That's always a good way to get a crisp image that won't bleed. Once you've choose your image, cut it out. Now what i like to recommend is if you have a image which is exactly the size of your scrabble tile pendant or your wood blank go ahead and you can cut it up on the lines that you have distinguishing the edges. Now if you have a image such as this which is a little bit larger than my tile i do not recommend tracing it. Now I'm going to show you example of why. If you look closely on this pendant right here you can see that what i did that I traced my image and then I cut around the trace marks. I kept cutting a little bit closer and I cut a little bit closer until I thought it fit my pendant and now what happened though was I cut a little too far in and now I have this little line which shows the wood along the edges of my tile and that's why I recommend that unless you have your computer and you've shrunken your image to exactly one inch and you know it's precise I recommend you cutting out your image a little bit larger than what your pendant is. So you've cut your imagine and it's larger than the tile itself which is what you want at this point and then what you want to do is you want to cut a straight edge around the top or one side. Whereever you want to line up your pendant. So like I know I want that cats head to be in the center of my tile so I cut a straight edge along the top. Now what I'm going to do to apply my glue and you can use a craft paint brush if you want, I actually prefer to use my fingers and find that I get a much smoother appearance and I don't have to worry about any of the bristles coming off and getting into my paper and wood. So I take my finger put a little glob of glue on it and then what I'm going to do and I caught myself there I almost put the glue on the tile I'm going to show you in a moment why you don't want to do that you want to go ahead and put the glue right on your image. and go ahead and put a good amount and just smooth it out. Make sure when you do place you tile onto this image that every corner of it is going to be covered in glue. So I can kind of see through my image at this point and I can see that I want it where the cat's head tail is. Okay so now I'm lining it up with that straight edge. I'm turning it over and I can kind of bend it a little bit right now. You can see I have that placed where I want it. The beauty of white glue is that you actually have some wiggle room. Look I can actually still move this around and then when I'm happy with the placement I'm just going to press it into place. I flip that over. I'm going to let that dry. Okay so why didn't I put the glue right on the tile pendant. The reason is that because the wood tends to absorb the glue faster than the paper and what will happen is something like this might occur. So I put the glue onto the wood and then I put the image onto the glued wood and part of my glue had already dried so my image is not already secured down. If that does happen you can just go back and apply some more glue. So your images are not wasted but it is an extra step and you do run the risk of the paper coming off of the pendant. Here I have an image which is already dried. you can see it's fully attached to every side. I'm just going to take a pair of scissors and cut right along the edge nice straight cut. My image is now fully adhered to my tile pendant. What I'm gonna do now is I'm going to coat it with Mod Podge. Now I'm going to do the same thing that I did with the glue, I'm just gonna use my fingers. Squeeze out a little bit of Mod Podge. Just gonna take my finger and dip it into my Mod Podge and then I'm going to coat the top of the image. What I'm going to do I'm going to make sure take I coat along the edges. You want to make sure that it's a sealed properly and I'm going to let that dry. You might be wondering why don't we just use Mod Podge for the bottom caot and the top coat. Why do we have to use white glue and then Mod Podge. Well we thought we could just use Mod Podge as well and we experimented with it and what we found is the Mod Podge dries a lot quicker than the white glue. So there wasn't that wiggle room to position your image on the tile but it wouldn't slide. So I really prefer to use the white glue that way I can have a little bit more time to play with my image make and sure to get it right where I want it and then allow it to dry. So you could technically use Mod Podge for the base as well as the top coat but I do find is a lot easier to use a white glue for bottom and Mod Podge for the top. Now that we've coated our images in a protective layer of Mod Podge and it has dried, what we're going to want to do is get that really cool glass like dome appearance and there's going two ways we could go about doing this. We can use a product such as Gel Du Soleil which is a one part resin or we can use a product such as Ice Resin which is a two part resin. So to begin I want to show you how to do Gel Du Soleil and I'm going to use a small bottle here. So Gel Du Soleil you can but in a large bottle which is great. It gives you a lot of product to work with and it has a convenient flip top. But for making Scrabble tile pendants I really like the applicator tip that is on the smaller bottle. This tip actually can just popped off and you can refill this bottle. So that's one little tip. You don't have to do it this way but I do find if a little bit easier. So what I'm going to do is you you are going to want to put some Gel Du Soleil in the middle of your pendant. I'm just going to put a lot of drops. Gel Du Soleil is a resin which cures in UV. UV of course comes from the sun which is great if you're in a sunny climate. You can go ahead and just put your pieces out on a windowsill. If you're not in a sunny climate what you're going to want to do is purchased a UV lamp and that's something that's very similar to what is at the nail salon where you put your manicure under to dry. With the UV lamp the Gel Du Soleil will cure in fifteen minutes which is really fast. It's a lot quicker than of course the two part resin. You notice that I'm doing my drops towards the middle. So what I'm going to do once I have quite a few drops is I'm actually going to take my applicator tip starting from the middle push my resin to the side. I'm just going very slow. Working every angle. Now Gel Du Soleil will not cure without UV. I lived in Seattle for quite awhile and I learned that lesson the hard way after five days and my resin was just as liquid as when i started. The surface tension is keeping the resin in place so it's not spilling over to the sides but you will also want to be careful. Now what I want to do since I'm not going to put this in the sunshine I'm actually going to put it in my UV lamp. I'm going to take a post-it Fold the post-it in half so the sticky side can back onto itself. Then what I want to do is very carefully slide the post-it under my tile use that as a little tray then going to put my tile in my UV lamp. If you rather use a two part resin instead of Gel Du Soleil to finish off your Scrabble like tile pendants is really quite simple. You go ahead and mix a batch of two part resin part A and the hardener and you let it set up for about five minutes to let the air bubbles escape naturally. You're not going to pour your resin. You're going to load some onto your stir stick and place a dab in the middle. What you're going to do is you're going to keep doing that for probably three, four times. Just keep going from the center. You don't want to get any on the edges at this point. After about four drops you're going to use your stick and start pushing the resin out towards the edges. You're going to wait about five minutes and then what you're going to do you're gonna come back with a heat source such as a torch and quickly go over it to remove any air bubbles and then you're going to let that cure for three days. It's been a couple days and our resin has now dried so we're ready to finish our tile pendants. Before we chose our bail I'm going to show you a quick tip. When you're using Gel Du Soleil this actually happened after we stopped the cameras and I want to show you, you can see there's a little bit of a variation in height on the Gel Du Soleil. Now what happened is when I put my piece onto my little paper tray and I put it into the UV lamp there's a little bit of a curve to the paper. I noticed this within just a minute or two but the UV had already started to set up to the resin. So it actually dried a little bit uneven. So that's a little bit troubleshooting tip. You just want to make sure that whatever you put under your tile to put into the UV lamp is completely flat. This is still a completely serviceable piece. It looks great but it is just a little bit uneven. Just take note of that and be conscious of it when using the Gel Du Soleil. I've pulled a selection of Aanraku pendant bails. With this finished tile pendant I have here I've adhered a heart shaped one. The most common shape you can see is this little leaf. It comes in three different sizes. I'm going to hold it in comparison to the wood tile that we carry here at Beadaholique.com and a usual scrabble pile. So you have small, medium and large. You can just decide which one you prefer aesthetically. Here's a medium one. You can see how that lays against the wood. I usually go with the medium size. If you want you can do a small one or you could go for the large. Personal preference. Do keep in mind though what you're gonna be putting through this hoop. in terms of the size of your chain. If you're going to put a really thick chain you are going to want to go with one of the larger sizes. We have a really petite chain. I'm going to be using a ball chain here in a little bit. Then I would go with a small or medium. But it's totally up to you. You can also choose an Aanraku bail with a celtic design, heart shape. There's a whole wealth of shapes that you can choose from. Also between silver and gold you can choose as well. I also want to show you an earring bail. This'll work great with one of the wood tiles that we sell here at Beadaholique.com. It's very nice and flush. One quick note though if you are doing it with traditional Scrabble tiles. The depth is a little bit off. You'll want to keep that in mind. Also note with the earring bails, the orientation of the little hoop is gonna be different than the orientation of the pendant. So I'm going to take one of the tile pendants that we made and I'm going to put a heart bail onto it. Really quite simple. I just have a piece of wire to use as a applicator you can also use a toothpick and I have some E6000 glue. Just going to use my applicator spread a little bit of glue on the bail line it up so that the orientation is with the top of the pendant and press in place. There's a little bit of glue coming out the edges. I just take my fingernail and scrape it away. I'm going to let that dry for at least an hour and then I'm gonna attach my chain. Usually with scrabble tile pendants you see a ball chain. I think it looks very nicely with them. You can purchase a pre-made ball chain which actually has a little connector clasp attached to it. You can also purchase ball chain by the foot. I've purchased two feet and I've cut it to sixteen inches and then you can purchase a little connecter clasp. This is a stainless steel ball chain. To attach the clasp you just put one end in that middle area pull it to the side and do the same with the other end and that creates a necklace. If you just want to string it though. I'm going to string it through my little mermaid pendant And there you go. You have a wood Scrabble like tile pendant Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supplies needs!