Don't you just love the way that some people spring surprises on you at the last minute. I've just logged on to my work email and have found that one of my colleagues got married this weekend and is coming into work tomorrow before disappearing off to some sunny beach for his honeymoon.

So I have an evening at Coventry Makerspace with various consumables and the combined inspiration of the other makers to create something personal for a very nice geek who is just about to set up home with his new wife.

Mooching through the wedding contest entries I saw the Laser Etched Wooden Coasters.

Combining this inspiration with the fact that he is always playing online scrabble during lunch, I'm going to make them a set of scrabble themed drinks coasters for their new home.

Step 1: Requirements

To make our Scrabble Coasters you will need access to the following:

Plywood suitable for laser cutting
Laser engraver
Scrabble font

Step 2: Scrabble Font

If you are going to create a quality themed gift you need to use the same styling as your inspiration. Therefore we need to find a font that matches the real Scrabble tiles.

So with a bit of googling and it was fairly easy to find a number of free Scrabble fonts that I could download.

Step 3: Design

Now what I didn't realise when i downloaded the fonts was that a couple of them actually had the tile shape incorporated into the font. So I was envisaging having to create the tile shape in some design application but everything was all there for me. An added bonus, that I had not thought about, was the inclusion of the tile value so everything I wanted was in the font itself for an excellent gift.

So using the Lasercut software I added in some text using my chosen font and there were my tiles . . . a bit of scaling to make them the desired size and we have the design sorted for half a dozen coasters.

At the moment the LaserCut software does differentiate between the letters to engrave, the basic outline and the edge where you want to cut through the plywood.

So I selected the outer line of each of the tiles, changed the colour to blue, the letters to green and the numbers to red. With each part group of lines separated by colour coding I then changed the cutting power and style for each colour. Blue was set to cut, green engraves the area and black and blue are different engraving strengths.

I then uploaded the design to the laser engraver and let it do its magic . . .