Christmas 2014: Pyrography Coasters

I’ve split my handmade Christmas gifts into a few posts (all with equally dodgy photos taken too late at night before my mad wrapping session).
This post involves burning cork.

For two of my sisters and their families, I made these pyrographied (is that even a word?!) coasters as part of their presents.

These are cork coasters from Ikea which annoyingly are too soft to use graphite transfer paper on. So I had to cut out each of my printed out template letters (EcuyerDAX font) and draw round them with pencil before burning. The cork obviously was quicker to burn that wood, but it didn’t burn so quickly that it was hard to control, as I feared it might be. Also, the divots in the cork didn’t really cause a problem, so altogether, I was just worrying for no good reason beforehand! You can see where I messed up the meant-to-be horizontal lines on the first ‘S’ and I just noticed there totally should be a line through the tail bubble of the ‘J’. Oh well. I totally love them, even if they are slightly flimsy.