3 Ways to DIY Coasters

Creating your own coasters is an easy way to spruce up a side table or create a custom gift. Start by gathering all of your supplies and laying out newspaper on a table to act as a barrier between your project and the table. After all, DIY projects can get a little messy.

Tile Coasters

Tile coasters are as simple as DIY coasters come. Head to your local hardware store and look around at the tile section. Tile comes in all shapes and sizes, so be careful if you are ordering tile online. You want to make sure that your tile square is about four or five inches on each side. Small pieces of tile like this can usually be found by bathroom or backsplash tiles in any hardware store and will usually set you back less than a dollar apiece.

Once you have your tile, make sure to clean it with a gentle soap and water mixture and leave it out to dry completely. After the tile is dry, flip it over to its backside and use hot glue or E-600—a very strong tile glue—to attach four circular felt pads to the bottom. It's super important that you use glue that sticks to the rougher, backside of the tile. Many felt pads are self-adhesive. Don't use a self-adhering pad for this project. The pads themselves will need to be small enough so that four of them can fit on the back of the tile evenly—one on each corner.

Let the glue on the pads dry and then flip them over and you’re done.

Twine Coasters

Start by taking cardboard and cutting it into a circle. This circle will ultimately be the size of your coaster so measure twice, cut once. It’s a good idea to trace a cup or a bowl in order to get a perfect circle that you can replicate over and over again—especially if you want to make a set of DIY coasters.

Once you have your circle, mark the middle with a pen. Take a roll of twin and carefully glue the end down in the middle. Then begin to wrap the twine in a swirl pattern around that initial glue point. As you wrap, make sure to carefully glue. Whether you’re using a strong crafting glue or hot glue, make sure that you cannot see the glue on the top or sides of the twine. While important, less is more here.

Swirl the twine until you’ve reached the outside edge of the coaster and then cut the twine and secure the tail end to the side. You can add felt pads to the bottom of this coaster if you’d like to.

Patterned Coasters

For patterned coasters, you'll need a ceramic tile, just like the ones used in the tile coaster DIY. White tiles work best for this project. After you have your tile, you will need to find some patterned craft paper and cut it to the same size as the tile square. You can trace the bottom of the tile onto your paper to gauge the size.

After you’ve cut the paper, place a very thin layer of mod podge on the tile and secure the pattern to the tile. Let this layer dry. Once the mod podge is dry and the paper is secure, mod podge over the top several times. As you layer up your mod podge, you are creating a protective barrier over your pattern. Once the mod podge is dry, add felt pads to the back.

If you are a fan of photography related crafts, you can use a picture as your pattern.

The Wrap

Once your project is done, you can take a stack of four or six and wrap them up as a gift. You can create your own wrapping paper or simply tie the stack up with a pretty ribbon or string. You can’t go wrong, as long as your coasters are nice and dry.