Look at those sad little letters. They should look like this:

Fail.

So here’s how not to make sandpaper letters.

First off, we used some thin wood that was fuzzy on its back. That didn’t work out so well. We cut it into decent enough sizes, but lost one piece so one of our letters had to get a short stubby shape.

Look at that sad little rectangle.

Painting them with milk paint was a big mistake too.

This stuff sounded so nice and eco-friendly.

But it ended up being rough and the opposite of smooth. I tried both a roller and a brush.

It was almost as rough as the sandpaper. Which makes this not work.

Then we took our lovely movable type:

And traced them backwards on paper. My neighbor said we want the same size movable type as your sandpaper letters:

Then we cut them out with a pair of scissors (It’s going well again, right?!)

Then we tried dipping the letters into glue. Fail again. I think tracing glue on the back worked better, but it still was lame:

The little letters wanted to come off the board. So I put wax paper in between and weighed them down with each other.

Which of course stuck to the glue.

Not to mention I put them too far from the right side of the board so there were big gaps when we tried to spell a word.

Brushing them all with a wet towel helped, but no one would want to hold these things let alone learn on them.

So in closing: I recommend using smooth acrylic paint, a better way to glue them down, and thin wood that isn’t fuzzy on the back. Though I don’t know what wood that would be. My neighbor used old cabinet doors for hers. We will be borrowing hers again instead of using ours.

Buying them is also an option! We bought ours from this etsy shop. Beautiful!

A better how to.