Sadler House

Making Custom Coasters

When you’re spending a lot of time making tables for your vacation  house, you can’t help but think about providing lots and lots of coasters. You know…in case people are open to avoiding rings on those tables.

Shopping around for coasters, you quickly realize that even the stupidest coasters seem to cost a lot of money. Also, the most affordable ones always seem to be those cheap ones that stick to the bottom of your glass when your glass is sweating and then drop water into your lap.

I wanted heavy, natural stone coasters, but they were all so expensive! I started looking around on Pinterest to see if there was a way I could make my own natural stone coasters, preferably with a custom imprint that would suit our house. Well, of course, there are a million tutorials out there about transferring images to any number of different surfaces. However, all the ones that exist for coasters seem to date back to a time when color copies were created with toner. Since inkjet is the norm now, the mod podge and nail polish crafts I encountered no longer worked with pictures I could produce easily at home. After ruining several coasters, I gave up on transferring a copied photo and went searching for another method.

In the end, my dreams of custom coasters were made possible by this helpful video via Caroline and allfreechristmascrafts.com which demonstrates using permanent ink and a stamp, and then baking the tiles in the oven to set them. Switching gears, I went to my local craft store and easily found the StazOn ink for about $9 and the perfect compass stamp for about $15. With  coupons, I got discounts on both. In the end, my craft store trip cost me about $14.

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