Snowflake Coasters

The gear coasters were fun but now it's winter.  You can't use the same coasters forever!Here are some snowflake coasters that are cheap and easy to make.  

Step 1: Designing

You could do the whole fold a piece of paper, cut it out, unfold it bit but that's so old school and what about paper cuts?...and all those little bits of paper everywhere?...what a mess...No, head on over to Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and grab their snowflake drawing app.  It's cross platform, light weight and pretty slick.It mirrors what you do to make a six sided design that looks eerily like a snowflake.Play with it a bit and you'll be making professional snowflakes in no time.  Save your favorites and you'll have a nice little batch of PDFs.

Step 2: Adjust

The PDFs that you saved are big- 8" square.  That's a helluva coaster.  Open it in your favorite vector editing program ( Inkscape is free and open source if you're in the market...) and scale it down to 4" square.  

Step 3: Cut It Out

Now you  have choices...Pick a material to make your snowflake out of.  I used luan plywood because it is inexpensive, looks great and I had some on hand.  Home depot sells it as floor underlayment for $12 a 4 x 8 sheet.  That's a lot of snowflakes!  (288 to be exact)  Any other fairly sturdy material would work just as well.Decide how you want to cut it out.  Really it depends on the tools available to you.  If you are the extremely patient type you could glue a copy of your snowflake to a piece of wood with rubber cement and cut it out by hand with a scroll saw.  A jigsaw or band saw with an extremely fine blade will do the trick too.  I used a CNC machine because I have one and I never get tired of watching it cut stuff out.......when it works............which is about 40% of the time

Step 4: Finished!

Stop cutting out snowflakes when you feel you have enough. You don't have to use the whole sheet of plywood, 288 coasters might be a bit excessive. We can make new ones for the spring. I promise.

Sand the top surfaces lightly, file or sand any fuzzy bits from the cutting and spray it with a clear coat. Shellac is nice and dries fast. Betcha didn't know it's made from a resin excreted by a bug in Thailand.

You're done!

Go get a cold warm drink and set your brand new coaster under it....

Other ideas:

Pretend you're a ninja and chuck them at people. No wait, don't do that, you might hurt your snowflake.

Spray paint them silver and gold, drill a little hole in each one and tie a piece of fishing line to them- Holiday Ornaments!

Write your name and contact info on them and use them as awkward yet unforgettable business cards,

The possibilities are really endless!

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Thanks!!