So, about that art project I was working on...

I bring you...

TADA!

The Scrabble Table


The Scrabble Table (aka "The thing that caused me to have arthritis at a very young age") is 1,320 Scrabble Tiles that are meticulously glued to the surface of my $40 grad school coffee table.

There are many many many projects that I only do once. This is mostly because at the beginning, I'm too stupid to realize what a pain in the ass it will be to complete. If someone asked me to do another one of these tables, I'd seriously look to hang myself from the nearest tree. If Ethan Allen knocked on my door and asked me to mass produce these (which I consider to be a major possibility at this point) I'd turn his ass into a handsome, handcrafted settee.

And since I know it's at the forefront of your mind...

You'll be happy to know that while I did successfully resist the urge to sneak any dirty words into the matrix...(e.g. "poop", "bitch", and "shit"... in case you needed some examples)...I inadvertently included A-S-S-C-L-O-W-N. Maybe it was just my subconscious trying to honor Michael Bolton. Who knows.

But seriously...since Seth and I are so close to our families (emotionally, rather than physically), I thought it would be a good idea to spread all of their names throughout the table. It makes me smile every time I spot a familiar name. I even included pets (*cough* I'm sorry, did I say "pets?" They're not pets...they're "cousins/nieces").


In the beginning, God created Target. Many years later, Target created a table. They created this table in the likeness of...a table.


"500 tiles outta do it," Kerry thought as she purchased her supplies on eBay.

Wow. Really. Really. Piss. Poor. Estimation.
Those tiles sitting on the table in the picture above aren't glued yet. They were just helping me nail down the actual number that I'd need.

At about $.07 per Scrabble tile, this makes my coffee table the most valuable thing in my home. Anything that someone wishes to set on the table has to go through an intensive 12 point screening. The below picture is fairly early in the process. As I recall, it was in between the time when I had a healthy dose of enthusiasm, and the time when it got so monotonous that I started speaking in tongues.







And with four coats of polyurethane and a custom black frame... we have a usable table.



And there you have it. Since I purchased the Scrabble sets from different folks, some are disco-era tiles and some are much more recent productions. Of course, they're not at all uniform in size (which I found to be an interesting challenge), and so I have a slightly bumpy table.

I'm glad it's over. I was tired of explaining to people what I was doing (since it made me feel like a creepy loser with nothing better to spend my time on).

"Hi! My name is Kerry, and as a hobby, I like to glue stuff to other stuff!"

I think it's definitely S-C-R-U-M-P-T-L-E-S-C-E-N-T (that's 22 points if you promise you won't challenge it).