Alphabet Magnets

This isn't intended as a crafty blog, but that doesn't mean I can't show off something I've made, does it?  I actually had time to do a craft for the first time in a long while, so I'm happy about that.  It was helpful that we had a blizzard yesterday, meaning I knew nobody would want to stop by and view our house, so I could afford to let my office get messy. 

I worked on it yesterday while my son played with some snow in the bathtub, and then I finished it after he went to bed, and during naptime today.  (The roads are already clear, despite the eight inches of snow we got overnight, so I guess I'd better clean up now.  Ah, spring in Colorado.)

Before he was born, we painted a few patches of magnetic paint on my son's wall and door, which actually proved to be relatively disappointing.  It isn't very strong at all, so the only magnets it can hold are the really thin ones, like the free ones you get with every phone book.  The next time I paint a child's room (hopefully in the new house) I will use drywall compound to fill in the gaps in the texture before putting on the magnetic paint, and I will use something like eight coats.  Hopefully the combination of a totally flat surface with a ton of the magnetic paint will result in a wall that actually holds magnets.

But anyway, on to my project.  Since the walls aren't strong enough to hold traditional alphabet magnets, I decided I would make some of my own--recycling the free magnets from the phone books.  My friend Sela has posted several times about projects she's made using a glue/sealer/finish called Mod Podge, so I decided to give it a try.

I attached pieces of cardstock to the magnets, and then traced the letters onto the back of the magnets.  I cut them out, and then applied two more coats of the mod podge to the front to give it a finish (and hopefully keep them from dissolving if my son decides to give them a taste.)

He's been playing with them as I write this, though most recently he keeps coming to my door, reaching over the baby gate, and handing them to me one by one.  This, after the fuss he made for me to give them to him in the first place.  Ah, toddlers.