Scrabble Name Frame!

Yay! This is the first official craft to be posted on A Glue Gun & A Prayer! It's a great gift for grandparents. Something personal, sweet, and something that they will be sure to keep forever. You will win grandchild of the year for sure! Here is the finished product:

Tools:

• Glue Gun
• Scissors
• One piece of scrap paper
• Pencil

Materials:

• Frame
• Tiled letters
• One Mardi Gras necklace

Estimated Time:

• 2 Hours

My Cost (not including tax):

• The frame I found at Hobby Lobby. It's actually just supposed to be wall art but since my grandmother lives in a shore house I thought this would go perfectly. It was originally $26.00 marked down 50% off so I got it for $13.00
• Hobby Lobby did have tiled letters, but they only had two bags (40 letters per bag) and I knew that I would need more. I checked Michael's and they had bags of 60 letters per bag for $5.00. I got two bags and had a 50% off coupon for one item so I got both bags for $7.50
• I already had the Mardi Gras beads in my house. 
• Total = $20.50

The Steps:

• First, arrange all of your tiles on your board. This is the hardest part because sometimes if you're short some letters (like I was with 'L') you need to ensure that those cross. You also need to make sure everything will fit, as well as make sure it looks somewhat symmetrical in the frame.

Here's what it looked like after I arranged everything. As you can see I had Michael spelled wrong. Have one or two people look at it to make sure everything is spelled right. Unfortunately I did not realize my mistake until after I started gluing.

• Use your hot glue gun to glue the tiles into place. The tiles that I purchased were not all uniform size, which I liked because it gave it an organic, homemade look.
  
• Here's what it looked like after I managed to spell Michael right. Unfortunately it caused Kaitlyn to be squished on the edge, but I think it looks okay.

• At this point I intended to be finished. But it still looked incomplete to me. It needed something else in the negative space. I went into my bedroom and spotted a box of Mardi Gras beads in my closet. I grabbed a purple one (only needed one necklace!) and cut the beads up.

• Then I simply cut a heart from a folded piece of construction paper, traced it with a pencil onto the frame, and started hot gluing the beads on. No need to trim that excess white string, just glue that side down!

• When I was finished I just took some tweezers and pulled the glue gun strings off from around the beads. Everything dried really quickly and now I have an awesome, inexpensive, personal homemade gift for my grandmother! I want to do another one for my other grandmother but she has 28 grandchildren! It would be a project but I might be up to it, who knows! If you try this project show me the final product and let me know what you did better than me!