DIY Cutting Board with Mom's Recipe

DIY Cutting Board with Mom's Recipe

This was a lot of fun to make!  It's much easier than I thought.  I purchased a bamboo cutting board at Wal-mart along with the wood burning tool set below.  It was in the craft department of Wal-mart.

I used the tip that was similar to a felt tip pen.  It worked on the bamboo the best for me.  You can experiment with the tip that works best for you.  This tool was comfortable to use.  

The first thing I did was scan my mom's recipe into my computer.  I then opened it in a program that made it larger.  I wanted it to fill up most of the cutting board.  I printed off the recipe.  Next, I placed a piece of carbon paper over the board and then centered the recipe onto the board.  It's easier to center if you cut away most of the paper around your recipe.  I traced the handwriting with one of those mechanical pencils.  I liked the very fine point for the tracing.  That way you can get the handwriting as close to the original.   

I then heated the iron up and began "writing" with it.  I used it like a pen or pencil and found it quite easy to fill in as shown in the image of the bread, flour and eggs.  If you can color in a coloring book, you can do this.  The bamboo is fairly forgiving and I just began coloring and it was so easy!  For the darker areas of shading, I went over a few times pressing a little harder until the desired effect was achieved.  I tried the very fine point from the tool kit and found it would take me forever, so I gave the "felt tip" type point a try and it worked perfect.  I was still able to achieve the fine lines.  This was on the bamboo.  I haven't tried using the tool on the other types of wood cutting boards.  Like the instructions say on the tool package, don't squeeze the tool too hard while working or you'll burn your fingers!  Very true!  Just relax and take your time and it won't burn.  Have fun!

Here are two I made for my mother-in-law to give to my brother and sister-in-law.  These are fun to make.  

After our move into a new home, I found this oak cutting board I had from way back in one of the older packed boxes.  I thought I could burn sunflowers onto the board for my daughter.  She loves sunflowers.  : )  The wood was easy to work with the burning.  I found this lovely wallpaper border print online and did the same where I used carbon paper to trace the image onto the board.  

 

Here's a fun idea where you can use an image from a wedding invitation to make a wonderful gift for the bride and groom.  I did this one the same as above by scanning the monogram band you see around the invitation into my computer and printing off the size I needed to fill the bottom of the cutting board.  You can get these bamboo cutting boards at Walmart.