This wood mosaic was made up of scrap wood pieces – all less than 5″ in length! If you’ve got bits of wood, you’ve got wood art.
This project my friends is a GREAT way to use up scrap bits of wood.
We’re talking teeny, tiny bits that you’ve held on to in the hopes that someday you *might need a 4″ piece of wood for something.
Not you? Yes, I have a problem 😂
I have been dying to try a wood art piece, sometimes called a wood mosaic, but I didn’t have the measurements for the gorgeous ones I’ve seen online. Some people can just create willy-nilly and their projects come together. Not me folks – I need some kind of game plan – even if that’s just the measurements for the first 2 cuts.
Just a few of the pieces of crap scrap wood I have in my stash and none of them longer than a foot.
What to do, what to do….
I think maybe set the mitre saw at a 45° angle and cut (8) pieces at 3″ long.
Seemed random at first right, but look at how pretty my scrap wood mosaic is already!
I took photos of the rest of the cuts and their placement so that you could replicate this too if you wanted. The best way to make your wood art and save your fingers is to set up a jig – just a blog of wood clamped to your mitre saw.
This allows you to make consistent cuts; just slide your wood up to the board and cut. I made the first mosaic piece at 3″ long, then set up my jig so that all the rest of the cuts would be the same length.
Here I added (8) more pieces of wood at 3″ long.
Eight pieces at ~4 ¼” long – I cut one piece, then reset the block of wood (jig)on my mitre saw for the new length.
It’s coming but my scrap wood mosaic still needs more… (8) more pieces at 4 ¼” long.
Eight 3 1/8″ pieces and then (8) 2 5/8″ pieces and I think it’s looking pretty good!
If you can look past the rough wood in varying colours, you can see that my wood snowflake is underneath there.
I gave every piece a sanding with 120 grit sandpaper and added a chamfer to any edges that butt up against each other. A chamfer means I sanded down the corners to give each edge an angled finish – I did this so that no pieces ran together. The beauty of this piece is seeing each individual component.
With some leftover stains I had lying around, I painted out each section separately. Once the stain was dry, I used wood glue to hold the parts together and clamp it tightly with a strap clamp overnight.
The wood glue and a few finishing nails here and there are holding my wood mosaic together (so far), but I wonder if I should reinforce the back with paint sticks or some kind of backer?
I’ll deal with that if it breaks I guess.
I did put a coat of Varathane Triple-Thick over the entire piece to protect it and keep any stain residue off of my walls.
I love the varying heights of the scrap wood pieces – it gives it such character and dimension.
The warm wood stain also gives it a cozy fireplace feel. I’d love to try this again in rainbow colours or gradient shades of the same colour. Maybe all in white with iridescent glitter on it for winter?
No shortage of scrap wood over here, especially since this wood art doesn’t require pieces longer than about 5″.
So, if you’ve been eyeballing different wood art projects and have been itching to try a wood mosaic – but are like me and needed a starting point – now you have one!
Get cutting and have a great one!