DIY Custom Kitchen Cutting Board

I know we’re posting this really early considering Mother’s Day is a month away. But, you know what! Time is flying by! Do you know where the first quarter of the year went? Because I haven’t got a clue. Besides, I’m taking my goal of prepping gifts beforehand (instead of the usual, waiting till the very last minute and panicking) very seriously! So, with Mother’s Day a mere 30 days away, I’m going to start working on ideas immediately. Let’s start with something simple that can be made from start to finish in about 30 minutes – a DIY Custom Kitchen Cutting Board!

For this gift idea, you’ll need:

A plain wooden chopping board
4 shades of paint (acrylic preferably)
Liquid Varnish
Non toxic permanent black marker
A pencil, paintbrush and scale

This tutorial takes about 30 minutes to complete. Though the budget can vary depending on the cutting board that you end up getting.

Steps:

To start with, clean the chopping board thoroughly and divided out the sides of the board into 4 parts (one for each color). Next, paint each quarter of the board in one color. You want to keep this very basic and just use plain colors without shading or adding any effect. You’ll see why later.

If you’re feeling nervous about the paint spilling over the sides, paste a layer magic tape around the edges i.e the top and bottom of the cutting board. This will help paint within the lines.

This cutting board had a nice groove on the top, so I painted this according to the color on the side. And, similarly painted the inner portion of the handle. I feel that the colors dress up the board really nicely. So, even if you want to use it as a platter, you can do that.

Once the paint has dried out (this shouldn’t take too long), add thin outlines of black on the top of the chopping board. We added outlines in and around the groove. And, for the board itself. This is a nice way to add finish to the design and covering up any paint that might have spilled over.

Next, write out words related to the many uses of chopping board (cut, mince, chop etc you know what I’m talking about) on the sides. First in pencil and then an overlap in pen. You can do this on all the sides if you have a thin handwriting. Mine was quite a thick font, so I decided to write only on two sides.

This is where using block colors (see!) becomes useful. Because, plain colors highlight the black really well. And bold black like this one, tends to go with all colors.