This year for Father's Day I decided rather than going out and buying another polo shirt or travel coffee mug, I'd get the kids involved and we'd make Dad a present that he'd love. I'd seen a cool tutorial on Pinterest a while back and figured what better time to try it than now! We decided to make Daddy a photo block for his desk. So, my little man helped dig through our wood scraps in the garage and we found the perfect piece of wood to use for our project. Next came picking out the perfect photo - I let Carson pick, and big surprise, he chose the one of our family parasailing while on vacation in Florida over spring break. :) I printed out our photo on Epson Premium Presentation paper {matte finish - Best. Paper. Ever.} and trimmed it down. Then we were ready to start our project.
Step 1:
The first thing we did was spray paint our block of wood black. I did this myself because I didn't feel like explaining to my husband why the side of our house or garage doors had graffiti all over it...which would most likely have happened if I gave in to my 6 yr. old's desperate plea that he'd be REALLY careful. Um, no. Sorry. Once the block dried we were all set to move on to our next step.
With our freshly painted (but dry) block of wood and our photo trimmed down to size we were ready to bust out the Mod Podge. I'm not going to lie and say I'm an expert at using this fantastic concoction...actually, it was my first time ever using it. *GASP!* I know. I have seriously been missing out. But, despite living in the mod podge dark ages for the past 33 years, we cracked a bottle open and went to town. This was the part where little hands were allowed to help - so I let the kids help {carefully} paint a thin coat of mod podge on to the side of the block where we wanted to adhere our photo. I laid the photo down {photo side up} and carefully smoothed it across the block so it could start to dry. There were a few areas around the edges where I had to clean up some excess mod podge, so I grabbed a damp cloth and wiped around the edges...while doing this I discovered you could gently rub the edges of the photo and get a pretty cool distressed look to it. You could probably achieve the save look if you waited until it dried {before applying the final coat of mod podge to seal the photo} and then used some sand paper on the edges. Fun stuff.
Step 3:
Once the mod podge had some time to dry {we waited about 20 minutes} then we grabbed some sand paper and softly scuffed up our photo a bit to add some texture to it. We blew off any left over dust residue and then we were ready to apply our top coat of mod podge. The kids helped paint another light coat over top of the photo. Carson got a little worked up exclaiming, "Mom! Now you've RUINED it!" and burst in to tears before I was able to explain that it'd dry clear, so we had to have a little chat to reassure him all of our hard work was not in fact ruined.
Step 4:
After everything was dry we used a silver sharpie marker to write Daddy a special message on the back of our photo block. We put the kids name on the back and the year - and viola! Our Father's Day gift was done! I had the kids help pick out a couple of other things to put in the gift bag with the present...like Daddy's favorite candy bar and some hard candy for his desk drawer at work. The kids were SO excited for Daddy to open his present!!
Here's our finished product before we wrapped it all up:
Watching the kids SO ridiculously excited to give Daddy his gift on Father's Day was PRICELESS! And Daddy was a pretty happy camper, too. Yay for personalized gifts that mean something!!
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