How to Make Sandpaper Letters

I mentioned the Sandpaper Letters that I made in my previous post.  Her is the promised entry on how to make them.  I will post about some of the other materials I have made in later posts.

To make these I used illustration board, which I found in the art section at Michael's Craft store.  I discovered this stuff when I was trying to make a board book for my son about a year ago.  It is basically a very thick, very durable, very hard to bend cardboard, that can be cut (with some difficulty) using a strong pair of scissors.  As I said, I used it to make a board book, it is very similar to board book cardboard though slightly thinner.  You could use any cardboard or wood for that matter to make these cards, but I wanted mine to be durable, and I am not great at working with wood, which is why I used the illustration board. Each card is about 2 inches by 3 inches I believe.  Basically I just printed out my letters and made the cards a good size to match. 

I wrote the alphabet in Microsoft Word using the "Calibri" font for all letters besides a and g.  I didn't like the a and g in the calibri font, so I made those two letters using the "Comic Sans MS" font.  Basically, I just tried to find the font that looked most like they would look when hand written.  I then made all of the letters bold so that they would be thicker and easier to cut out.  I chose to go with lowercase letters because you actually encounter lowercase letters far more often in the real world than you do uppercase letters so I decided to teach them to my son first.  If you are making uppercase cards, you can just use the Calibri Font for all letters.  I used a font size of 250.  A font size of 300 would probably have been better, but then I would have only fit 3 letters per page and I didn't want to waste that much paper. 

To summarize that previous paragraph in case you just want the font and size that I used, here you go.

Font: Calibri for all letters besides a and g, Comic Sans MS for a and g
Size: 250-300
Make the letters bold

I was a bit concerned about how I was going to cut the letters out of sandpaper.  I found that since the sandpaper is rough, I could just hold the letter that I printed off of the computer right on top of the sandpaper and cut around it without it slipping. 

If that does not work for you, you can try printing the letters out on a very thin paper that you can see through, and gluing it to the back of the sandpaper and then cutting around it. 

Or you can cut each letter out of the paper, glue the letter to the back of the sand paper, and then cut it out of the sand paper. 

Or, if you have a way to reverse letter on the computer, reverse the letters before you print, print it out and glue it to the back of the sandpaper. 

I was able to cut the whole alphabet out of 1 piece of sandpaper though it was tight.  If you are not as careful as I was about not wasting any, or if you use a larger font, you will need at least 2 sheets of sandpaper.  I was able to cut all of the letters out in one evening, even with R and T both helping me.  I expected it to take me a lot longer than that.

After the letters were cut out, I cut my illustration board into rectangles that looked like a good size to hold the letters.  I think they are about 2 inches by 3 inches, but I don't feel like going downstairs to measure one right now.  I cut out 26 rectangles and painted 21 pieces red using acrylic paint, and 5 pieces blue.  In traditional Montessori the consonants are red and the vowels are blue. 

Once the paint was dry I Mod Podged the letters onto the boards.  I recently discovered Mod Podge Glue.  I truly have no idea how I did not know about it until now.  It is a glue/finish that works well on both paper and wood.  I bought mine at Michaels craft store and I am guessing you can buy it at any craft store.  It comes in a few varieties, I used the hard coat stuff, though I did try a few with the basic Mod Podge and it worked fine as well. 

Basically, I just smeared some mod podge onto the center of the board and stuck a letter on top.  You may want to let it dry a bit at this point, but I was lazy and went onto the next step right away.  After the letter is stuck in place, cover the entire top, including the part with sandpaper with the modpodge.  Only do one coat on top of the sandpaper or it becomes too smooth (I did two coats on a few of mine and they didn't turn out as well).  I got the idea of Mod Podging the letters on from another blog, and I admit that I can now not find it to give the person credit.  So if you were the one with the original idea, thank you. 

Let the cards dry, and you are done.