Add a little magic to your entertainment area and create these easy to make Moroccan Coasters inspired by the bold, effervescent colours and styles of Morocco.

Make these gorgeous Moroccan  coasters using a jewel-toned colour palette and linocut

What you need:

• 4 pieces of wood 9 cm x 9 cm
• a stencil or lino cut with your design
• colour paint (Moroccan colours are is inherently bright and whimsical, so choose colours like copper, turquoise and emerald green)
• a paint brush
• spray varnish to seal

The wood we used didn’t have enough dents and bangs for my taste so I had a quick de-stress in our drive way and mushed those pieces around on the gravel. We also used our new Dremel Router bits to give the edges some character. (Sorry no pictures, we were way to excited about how these things work).

To distress the wood mush them around in gravel

That looks so much better 🙂 Now for the paint. I chose Dala Metal Craft Paint, which is very popular here in South Africa – local is lekker julle. The paint has beautiful metallic tones and comes in the most amazing colours. For our Moroccan coasters I used Denim, Violet, Green and Copper. Paint each coaster a different colour using a normal old paint brush. Squish the paint into the dents and dings and cover the entire surface. Leave to dry for about 10 minutes. Then take another colour and dry brush the coaster. To dry brush simply take a dry brush 😎 and dip it lightly into your paint. Dab it on a paper towel to remove any excess paint if you were a bit heavy handed. Then use quick brush strokes in the same direction to give it a textured look. Don’t do the squishy thing, you still want to see the original colour in the dings. The different shades create a beautiful rich, layered finish.

Love, love, love the colour combinations. Once the Moroccan coasters are dry you can add your design. I used this stencil which I found at Vintage Revivals to create a linocut.  Instructables has a really nice tutorial on how to make your own linocuts, but if you’re worried about your fingers a stencil will work just as well. Ink up your linocut and transfer your design by pressing down firmly on the linoleum.

Use a brayer to roll ink onto your linocut

And they’re almost done. All that’s left is to spray some varnish over the coasters once the ink has dried.

Linocut prints on richly coloured Moroccan coasters

Poifect for an ice cold beer or a lovely glass of red wine.