This is one of those fun projects in which the possibilities are endless! Transferring images onto little round discs. I had planned on simply making some custom wooden nickels from craft-store wood discs, until I happened upon a vintage box of plastic poker chips with nice smooth surfaces.
You can also customize Scrabble tiles and all kinds of other objects for cool and unique tokens, pendants, keychains, and more, yeah- even fabric! In vintage style, I designed my wooden nickels in black and white. You can also go full color!
Besides the wooden discs, chips, or other pieces you’ll be transferring to , the two key materials for the success of this project are:
1. A Chartpak Blender Pen, found in most art supply stores or online HERE
2. Laser-jet prints or photocopies (must be powder ink, not wet ink.) I had to drive to the copy store for my copies as I only have an ink-jet printer. BE SURE TO FLOP YOUR IMAGE! (mirror image of your artwork.) When creating my designs, I added a faint circle border the same size as the discs I would be transferring to for a positioning guide.
I purchased 1-1/2″ wooden circle discs at the craft store, and the same size poker chips at the thrift store.
I had photocopies made of my own designs and cut them apart. I added a top center mark on each for 2-sided positioning so the art lined up somewhat front to back.
Line up the disc to the positioning circle and tape to the paper in a couple of places. This helps keep the art from shifting when transferring.
Turn the disk and paper over and with the blender pen, simply stroke across the back of the paper. Once is usually enough, too much and you can turn your image to mush.
Remove the paper and repeat the steps for the other side, lining up the top center (or bottom, which ever you prefer.) Again, stroke over the paper with the marker.
For another fun effect, you can stack up some of your discs or poker chips and stripe the sides.
These nickels are great for little give-away promotions, tokens of appreciation, birth announcements, even allowance tokens (I never have cash on hand at the end of the week.) Drill a hole and use as a pendant or keychain or make some Pay-It-Forward coins to share.
Just for fun, I made some extra wooden nickel images that you can customize yourself.