Monogram Wooden Coasters DIY

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A couple of years ago, I was helping to plan a country wedding. I used Pinterest to help me come up with all sorts of cute ideas. One of the things I really loved was using small wooden discs as coasters. I didn’t like the price of them though. My husband and I made a small batch for the wedding then. This past Christmas we did it again as they made really cute gifts. 

Thankfully, I have a very helpful husband who is good with an arm saw. Me, I’m still a bit scared to use it. We also were fortunate to have a few small trees in the woods behind my house that were a perfect diameter and were also dead.


After chopping down the dead tree we cut it into two foot manageable pieces. To keep the cuts the same length, we attached a piece of wood to the table that would allow us to place the limb ¼” past the blade. Now as long as the limb was pressed against the block we would have cuts that were consistent. My husband cut all the way forward then all the way back, and fun fact - when you go backwards with the arm saw and have such a small piece, it will fly off the table. I didn't realize this. 

Once the pieces were cut, we had to sand each of them to make sure there were no rough spots. I would have used a sanding block but we had a ton of coasters! So we used the belt sander. 

The next thing to do was let the coasters dry out before trying to stain them. We actually were a bit impatient and used my food dehydrator over night. Some of the coasters ended up cracking but we still had several dozen. If these were items I'd bought, that be one thing, but for an already dead tree, I could sacrifice a few. 

After staining them, we realized we needed some sort of buffer between them and the tables. I didn't want to cut out little felt circles and hope they all were the right sizes. Not to mention, I didn't have any felt.

I did, however, have a ton of glue sticks and had just watched a video where the person melted hot glue sticks to create buttons. Their process seemed simple enough, hold the clothes iron over the hot glue and watch it melt. I'm not sure what kind of iron they had, but after five minutes of holding the iron over the cut glue sticks, my arm was tired and the glue wasn't even close to melting. The heat was just escaping. To keep the heat in and give my arm a rest, we used metal cookie cutters to create a barrier around the coaster. I was able to place the iron on the cutters and walk away.

I came back after 5 minutes and the hot glue had fully melted into perfectly round blobs. It took another 10 minutes for them to completely cool so no my blobs were perfect nonslip grippers. 

To finish the coasters, I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut a stencil of the letter B for the happy couple. I simply used a darker stain to fill in the letter. 

These ended up being so much easier to make than I realized. I can understand the prices I saw online though as it was quiet a bit of work. 

If you'd like a set of these but don't have the tools or time for it, check out our Etsy shop: Wooden Monogram Coasters