Birthday Blocks

At church I work with the kids up to age 12 we don't have a lot of kids in our group just because of the size of the congregation, so we wanted to do something a little different for them then the usual pencil and bracelet.  This is what we came up with.  

We had a 2x4 cut into 6 inch pieces for us.  We made a total of 20 complete blocks and we still have probably another 15 unpainted blocks leftover from the project.  As you can see we painted them all black.

  After the paint dried we used mod podge and attached a picture of the temple that we have been assigned to attend.  In this case it is the Washington D.C. temple.  We were originally going to find out what each kid's favorite temple was but then decided that it would cost too much and might be difficult to get a picture of that temple the size we wanted.  After the mod podge dried we added the vinyl saying (which I cut out on my cricut and I got about 26 of the saying's to the sheet) then put another layer of mod podge to secure the vinyl on the blocks (mostly because we were giving them to the kids).

For the girls we attached a purple ribbon around the block.  After giving the first block to one of the older girls yesterday I suggest hot gluing the completely around the blocks.  I only glued under the block and she had untied it and removed the ribbon from the block then had trouble getting it back on.  The boys are receiving green ribbon and I hot glued the ribbon all around it.

The overall cost for everything less then $10

The 2x4 was around $8, I already had the mod podge as well as the paint and we really didn't use that much of either.  We made copies of the pictures of the temple and then I only used one sheet of vinyl that cost me $.99  We are excited how it turned out and the kids were excited to see them for our first birthdays.