Life of an Item with Senioritis

What do the Wall Street Journal, paper towels, and CD cases all have in common?

Well, these are all things we used to use to keep rings off of things before we made our Famous Seniors coasters.

Inspiration:

While keeping our surfaces clean and dry is pretty sweet[and a terrific added bonus] we must admit that this was not the initial inspiration behind our line of coasters. We had been designing prints for several months and had received pretty good feedback; however, one common remark we were hearing from people time and again went something like this:"Hey, we like your designs,but we don't have the space to hang a bunch of 11x17" prints." With this in mind, we started to search for other ways to display our designs with the hope that we could come up with something that would be functional while still looking cool. The famous seniors smiled on us, and we stumbled upon an excellent how-to article for tile coasters from fellow Etsian, kittybeans. So, of course, we said to ourselves, "Selves, people drink things, and their drinks probably sweat the same way ours do. It would be pretty sweet if people could have a tricked out way to protect their delicate surfaces." Thus, a legend was born. Our first set of coasters appeared on our counter that night-the second, although lesser known, recorded immaculate conception.

Process:

Truth be told, no, our first set of coasters didn't just appear, we made them.

While tile coasters are nothing new, here at senioritis we like to do things a bit differently. We liked the idea of tile, but after dropping one on a concrete floor and seeing the corner chip we figured there might be a better alternative. The answer for us was Plexiglas; it's lightweight, very strong and most importantly, we would get to use the word Plexiglas in our descriptions.


To make our coasters, we start with a sheet of Plexiglas that we cut into 4" squares.

We then make 3.75" square designs. We print our designs on 80-pound card stock, after which they are laminated and cut.


Next comes the fun part: it's time to get our designs on to the Plexi. Time to break out some mod podge (as a side note:the first time this appeared on our shopping list I thought it was an alt rock band and had to ask someone at the art store if it was an actual product). Once we have our mod podge, we grab a foam brush and put a few coats onto the Plexiglas, position the design on the Plexiglas and center it as best as possible. Once the design is centered, we put a few coats of mod podge over the design.



After the mod podge dries, we spray the coaster with an acrylic sealer and repeat the whole process several times. Finally we place 4 vinyl bumpers on the bottom of each piece of Plexiglas and shazam!
We now have some coasters.


While our coasters are currently out of stock, they should be back for an encore soon. Until then, stay thirsty friends.