You know the feeling of having no clue what you should give your favorite person..?

Then you are right on this side! Welcome!

In this Instructable we are creating together a cutting board specialized for a couple. This special cutting board can be used in the kitchen, to cut any material on it you want.
The cutting board has the dimensions of 18 cm x 12 cm. On top of it will initials which are cut out.

Thank you and have fun!

Step 1: Getting the Materials

The first step is to get all your materials you need for the creation of your wood cutting board for the kitchen. After all the materials are collected we can jump right into the creation of our cutting board! Have fun!

Materials you need:

- wood for the board (

- wood for the initials (poplar wood; dimensions 10 cm x 6 cm)

- saw for cutting out the wood

- drilling machine for making the hole

- sandpaper

- paint for the initials (in different colors)

- polish for the board

- newspaper

Step 2: Cutting the Board

The first "bigger" step we need to do is to cut the board... so lets do this.

We take our wood piece and first of all mark where we should cut. Draw with a pencil the outline of the board. After that we cut the whole thing out with the saw. It is easily makeable with an electrical saw but there are some safety aspects you need to remember.

3 Safety aspects while working with electrical saws:

No 1. When you have long hair, tide it back so that it can not come in contact with the machine

No 2. Always were safety glasses, even when you don't think something will come into your eye.

No 3. Remember to pay attention to your hands, the machine won't take care of your hands so you must do!

Step 3: Making the Hole

Still the board, would be definitely not enough and we need to do something to make it even more visual appealing?

For this I would suggest that we make a hole in the cutting board so that we can better hold the board, if you find this unnecessary you can leave this step out if you want. For this step we need a drilling machine to make the hole ( it would be great if you have different plugs for the drilling machine that you can make even bigger holes ). The hole is placed on the left upper corner to make the whole cutting board easier to hold and to find grip.

In fact of that the board is really thick we need to make sure that while we are drilling that we do not damage something else, so make sure that the board is fixed somewhere and than you drill the hole in it. For no damage in with your eyes , make sure you wear safety glasses and tide long hair back. You really need to push the drilling machine on the wood so that it will take not forever to make a hole in it. After that just go over it with the sandpaper and go also in the hole in it. So that would be it and your hole makes your board even more amazing!

Step 4: Smoothing Sides and Edges of the Board

We are still not done with our work on the board... so here is the next step:

To make the board visually appealing the corners are not pretty enough. So the idea is to round the corners of the board to make the board on one side modern with the design but keep it also simple. We use therefore the sand machine which has sandpaper but it is a machine which makes it easier than using sandpaper by hand. We hold the edge of the board close to the machine and than make smaller moves to round the corner of the board.

After the cutting of the board you might have realized that the edges and the sides of the board are not so smooth or?

This problem we can solve while using sandpaper. Just grab a piece of the sandpaper, hold it in one hand and in the other the board. Make sure that you hold the board tight in our hand and it will not fall down. With the sand paper rub over the whole board and especially the sides and the corners of the board so they will get more soft. The risk when you don't go over with the sandpaper is that you can hurt yourself easily with some splinters. Soo.. sandpaper is your friend and not enemy!

Step 5: Cut Your Initials

After the creation of the board, we will take a look at the initials, which are playing also an important role in the whole design.

The first thing we need to do is to sketch the initials on the wood. This makes it easy to follow along with the electrical saw. The wood we use is poplar wood, which is not to thick as the wood of the board. The sketches of the initials you can see in the first picture, I used the dimensions 10 cm x 6 cm.
After we drew the outlines of the initials we will cut them out, as we can see in picture two. It is important to pay attention of your hands and also wear safety glasses, as already earlier mentioned (please don't underestimate the risks while working with saws). In fact of that the wood is not really thick it was easy to cut it out.
The last picture shows the initials after the cutting out. When you take a closer look you can see there are some lines not quite precise, but this problem we can solve with the sandpaper.

Lets take a look what we need to do for the next step ->

Step 6: Smooth Your Initals

The inaccuracies after the cutting out are quite annoying right..?

In this step we will smooth our initials with the sandpaper. The sides are not cut our precise and this problem will solve the sandpaper. You easily take a small piece of it and then rub it against the wood, after a while you will notice that the whole wood is more smooth. But don't smooth the sides for to long, this will be too much. As you can see in the third picture I really used power and rubbed the sandpaper tide to the wood piece.
You can also rub over the whole initial and not only the sides this will make everything even more perfect, believe me.

Step 7: Paint the Wood

I think this is definitely the most fun part of the project, because who does not like painting?

We need for this step the paint we have got and also our finished pieces to finalize them. I used blue and as well orange for my initials, the blue is for the man and the orange is for the woman. I colored all parts and sides of the initials to make them visually appealing from all various perspectives. I colored them really precisely and colored a many times over them, because I wanted the colors to be very intensive. I waited a few minutes and than colored again over, to have sort of a second layer.

This was only for the initials, for the board we use a transparent polish, which we will paint in 2 layers over the cutting board. The polish gives the board a more shiny effect, you will see.

(ps: You as a creative artist need newspaper which you put below the wood piece, to make sure that you don't attack your table)

Step 8: Glue the Initials on Top of the Board

I hope after all this different steps your are not too exhausted.. because here comes the last step, I promise!

We painted both our board and our initials but a single board and singles initials we don't need right? So we need to glue them together. For this we use just glue for wood and a brush. We paint the long side of the "F" and the right side of the "W" and put the "W" in front of the other initial and glue them together. This we hold for about 2 minutes to make sure it is fixed. After that we paint the side below of the initials with the brush and the glue on it. We take the initials and our board and glue them on it and hold both the initials and the board. We hold this again for 2 minutes.