DIY Burlap Placemats & Chalkboard Coasters

This DIY gift I loved so much, I kept one for myself…Stenciled Burlap Placemats and Chalkboard Coasters. It’s super easy and contributed to my secret goal to incorporate burlap into every room in the house!

I bought some burlap at JoAnn’s and cut it down to 13″ x 17″, an inch wider and longer than I wanted my finished placemat to be. I followed this great tutorial for how to cut burlap in a straight line, and it saved me so much frustration! Then I hand washed the rectangles to get rid of that weird burlap smell and soften their texture just a bit. After ironing them flat again, I did a straight stitch around the edges, 1/2″ from the border, to keep them from fraying. Then I purposely frayed the edges up to the stitching, just to give them a more unified look.

At this point, they were ready to be stenciled. I used my Silhouette to cut the stencils for my words. By cutting out the word, rather than the letters, I didn’t have to worry about messing up the kerning when I stenciled. For once, having very old craft paint was a huge win. My black paint had been left over from my mom’s stash and I’m pretty sure it was purchased somewhere around 1987. It was thick and clumpy, but it worked perfectly to give me very crisp letters. The paint didn’t bleed out from under the stencil edge at all.

I love chalkboard paint! If we didn’t rent our house, I’d probably cover the entire kitchen in chalkboard paint. For this project though, I limited myself to just the coasters. I purchased the cheap tiles at Home Depot (16 cents each) and glued a piece of black felt to the bottom of each with a hot glue gun. Then I gave each coaster two coats of chalkboard paint.

I wanted each coaster to have a toasting phrase and originally planned to stencil that too. But the font was too small and thin for that to work well, so I ended up tracing my stencil in pencil and then painting it free-hand. Despite my shaky hand, I liked how they turned out.