How To Make Images for Scrabble Tile Pendants

Scrabble tile pendants,

they seem to be all the rage right now.

My husband thinks they are a waste

 of a perfectly good Scrabble game.

But, he loves to play.

I think he likes it because he always wins!

A friend of mine was doing

some cleaning and wanted to get 

rid of her Scrabble game.

So I volunteered to "adopt" it.

Now that I had the tiles I needed images.

There are a ton of people on Etsy and other

places that are offering to sell you files 

or pre-made images. 

Don't be tempted!

It's really very easy to shrink 

down an image of your choice.

I mean isn't that the point of this craft?

To make personalized jewelry?

Alright, 

lets start with an image.

I happen to really like this one,

and since it is so famous and old no one

will be hounding me about copyright

infringement.

Use whatever photo editor your chose,

for my purposes I will use Picasa.

Now crop it into a roughly 

rectangular shape

Try to focus on one large image

that doesn't have a lot of detail.

Now shrink the image 

using the "Resize" function 

to approximately the same size 

as your scrabble tile.

I found that the best size was

65 to 70 pixels across.

I shrunk this one to 70 x 81

Notice that you have lost 

image clarity when it gets this 

little.

To fix this issue

use the "Sharpen" function 

and boost it way up.

Notice how much clearer the

image has become.

Then go into the "Color" function 

and up the saturation. 

After that use the "Exposure" function

and bump up the contrast of your image.

Trust me you want a little extra

color in the picture to make it pop.

I tried three images last night,

this is how it turned out after I glazed them.

Some tips:

• Use images with bright colors, you get better results
• Try to limit white space, pictures with color show up better
• Don't use a highly detailed image, the detail gets lost
• Experiment with where you crop a larger image, you may be able to use part of the image in a way you didn't see before.

I hope this was helpful,

later this week I'll post 

other How To's on how to 

make these pendants.

Stay tuned....