Crafty Thursdays: Mystery Scrabble Plaques & Giveaway

Kim Hammond joins us today for another fabulous Scrabble tile craft. And yes, she is giving one of these beauties away, so don't forget to comment below by naming your favorite detective. If you would like to be kept up to date on future Crafty Thursday posts and giveaways, you can like our Facebook page or join the mailing list at the right and now for the Mystery Scrabble Plaque instructions...

It’s Thursday and you know what that means, we’re getting our craft on. Today’s craft involves a Mystery Playground favorite, scrabble tiles. But first, a little info on the game so we can make this an educational experience as well. Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a gameboard which is divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, flow left to right in rows or downwards in columns. The words must be defined in a standard dictionary. 

The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and has been sold by Hasbro's Parker Brothers division since 1999; prior to 1999 it was sold as a Milton Bradley game. Outside the United States and Canada, Scrabble is a trademark of Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American homes have a Scrabble set. (Wikipedia)

You can buy the tiles at most craft stores, and of course online at Amazon. But I prefer to have my mom on the hunt during garage sale seasons for old scrabble games. I can never have enough tiles, and now that I have accumulated a container full, I decided it was time to do a craft for Mystery Playground.

Here are my required supplies:

1. A variety of scrabble tiles

2. Mod Podge

3. Paintbrush

4. Paper plate

5. Elmer’s glue (not pictured)

6. Pages from a salvaged book

7. A surface to use as a plaque- I bought mine at Michaels for only $1.00

Now for the fun part, making my mystery-themed words. This took a while, moving letters around and seeing what I was able to spell. Sometimes I had to give up a word  to use the letters (maybe I need more tiles).

The next step was to cut strips out of the book pages and mod-podge them onto the wooden plaque. If your plaque is small enough, you could use just one large page. But I like the uneven look, so I overlapped my strips like below. I also glued the edges over and onto the back of the plaque to make the ends look finished.

While the plaque was drying, I tried to see how the different scrabble words could be used like a crossword puzzle. This was harder than I thought. I changed things around before I found something I liked. But once I got the hang of it, I had a lot of fun. What mystery reader doesn’t like a puzzle?!

Then I tried the words on the plaque to make sure it fit. Once I was happy with what I had, I used my trusty Elmer’s to glue the tiles onto the plaque.

If you want to hang your creation, you can glue a ribbon or a piece of twine to the back. I plan on propping mine up on a bookshelf so I didn’t attach anything.