Micarta Love Letters (Wood and Fabric)

Cut out your own "love letters" using scrap wood, thrift store fabric, and overpriced epoxy.

We started with women's tops from Goodwill (thrift store) that had floral patterns. We paid $9 dollars for 4 shirts. Then we cut Mahogany scraps into 6" x 8" rectangles. Depending on the thickness of the fabric, cut between 3-10 layers of each pattern. I maximized what I could get out of each shirt and ended up with about 4 layers each.

I used West System two part epoxy. Be VERY CAREFUL with this stuff. As you can see in the video, it got hot enough to smoke and set up much faster than expected. Make a "fabric sandwich" with one layer of the wood, the fabric, and then one sacrificial piece of wood. Make the sacrificial wood as thin as possible. Clamp everything together as even as possible.

Clean up the rough edges of the blanks on the table saw.

Use spray adhesive to attach your templates to your Micarta blanks.

Sand away the sacrificial top wood to reveal your fabric pattern. We used a planer to make short work of it. If you sand them, another option is to reveal only small patches of the fabric to give a "distressed" look.

We tested spray lacquer and spray polyurethane but the lacquer looked much better on the fabric. We hung our finished letters on the wall, but you could easily put them on a shelf or ledge.