Tutorial : Vintage Inspired Wooden Christmas Blocks

Today I am trying to get in to the spirit of Christmas, so I made a tutorial to show you how to make some vintage-inspired wooden Christmas blocks:

You will Need:
Wood to cut into squares for the blocks
Acrylic paint and brushes
A computer and printer
A piece of cardstock
A craft knife
A glue that dries tacky
A sander with a fine grit sandpaper

Instructions:
First you will need to cut up some wood to use as blocks. You can make these any size you like, so long as they are square. The ones I have made are 4cms x 4cms and are made out of pine. Give them a paint in your chosen colour (this is the colour that the letters will be):

I was originally going to make a green 'noel' set and a red 'joy' set, but I lost one of my red blocks!

Anyway, you will need to use your computer to print out the word that you want to put on your blocks (in my case, 'Noel'). It is important that you print it out on cardstock as normal 80gsm copy paper will not be strong enough for the upcoming steps. Once you've printed out the word using a font that you like, carefully cut each of the letters out:


Coat the back of each of the letters with a glue that dries tacky (I've used Bostik's 'Glu Tack') and leave to dry for around 5 minutes:


Then place them in position on the blocks:

Next, begin painting the block with your main colour, making sure you remove the printed cardstock letters before the paint dries. You can do this by using your craft knife to pry the letters off:

This is what happens if your letters are not left to go tacky. The cardstock sticks pretty bad:

Not to worry, it'll all work out in the end!

Continue to paint the main colour of the blocks until all sides are painted. This takes a little while as you will need to wait for the paint to dry before painting the underside. If you find that your paint is not covering well (as in the picture below), you will need to continue to paint the blocks until a nice even coverage is obtained:


Once the painting is all finished, you should end up with blocks that look something like this:

They look pretty ordinary at the moment, but once you load up your sander with a fine grit sandpaper and give them a good going over, they take on quite a nice vintage feel. Give them a coat of mod podge to seal them and you're done!