Tiling a Tray With Popsicle Sticks

I bought a tray from a thrift store a while back. It was a good size, and I loved the black wrought iron handles and dovetail joints. But I wanted to be able to use the tray year round -- which meant the Christmas scene painted on the bottom had to go.

Here's what the tray looked like when I started.

I had a bunch of popsicle sticks laying around. Some of them were already stained from a previously abandoned craft project. I decided to use them to tile the tray with.

Step one was to cut all of the popsicle sticks up into tiles. That took a while. I tried a variety of different tools (craft knife, guillotine paper cutter, garden pruner) to make the cuts. In the end, a sharp scissors seemed to work best.

When I had all the popsicle sticks cut, I painted the tray black (to make sure none of the Christmas scene would peek through between the tiles) and started dry fitting the pieces.

I went with a simple two-horizontal, one-vertical pattern that I just kept repeating.

I tried to grab the tiles randomly, so the wood tones were varied throughout.

It was a lot like putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

When I had all the pieces in place, I went back and glued each tile down with wood glue.

My tiles were not cut with precision accuracy, which meant there were a lot of gaps between the pieces.

Time to break out the wood filler.

I smooshed the wood filler into the gaps with my fingers and then wiped off the excess with a wet paper towel.

Ah, much better.

Once the gaps were all filled, I put a coat of wax over the top of the tiles, and my tray was done.

Original article and pictures take http://www.hometalk.com/10074363/tiling-a-tray-with-popsicle-sticks site