For the Scrabble Lover in Your Life

This year Luke's grandma turned 80! We had a surprise birthday party for her and to celebrate. As we got closer to the party date I wracked my brain for gift ideas. This was a big birthday and I wanted to do something sentimental and personal. We thought of a lot of ideas that were out of budget or would take more time than we had to allot.

I tried to think of things she liked and finally came up with the perfect idea. Nana loves Words with Friends... What if we did a framed Scrabble poster with all of her grandkids names?? 

It was a little more work than I'd anticipated and it didn't help that by the time I came up with this idea we only had a few days left but we somehow managed to pull it off!! 

What homeschool mom *wouldn't*
make this a fun little lesson?

With a few unmarried grandkids and I'd assume many unborn great-grandkids we decided to stick with the bloodline. It would likely be too big if we did everyone anyways. 

As it stood, with 8 names we had to use an 11x17 frame. We caught them 50% off at Michael's and it worked out great. Only hitch... I'd planned to use scrapbook paper as the background behind the Scrabble puzzle and that wasn't going to happen if the frame was 17" long. 

So then the search began! Fabric would look great but might get pulled down by the heavy tiles, poster board was boring, layering scrapbook paper just didn't look right... So instead of looking nice and sophisticated like I initially thought hoped for, I decided to go sentimental and let the boys paint the background. Did it look as nice as I'd pictured in my head? No, not really. But it was probably even better because this was sentimental and special. 

The final product looked great. We used Gorilla Glue to stick the pieces to the board and voilà! 

Maybe you're looking for a great Christmas idea for Grandma/Grandpa (or another wordsmith member of your clan) in which case I hope you find this idea helpful and fun! 

If you chose to make your own you can use actual Scrabble game pieces or order a craft set like this (which has the exact same tiles as the game comes with) and save some money. Be mindful of what letters you need, there are surprisingly few 'K's for instance so I was careful to make our two names with 'K' intersect so I didn't have to buy two sets.

I'd love to see any of your family Scrabble creations! Happy puzzling!