My Domino Obsession: Crafting With Dominoes

About ten years ago, I saw a box of wooden dominoes at a flea market for $3.00. As I was looking at the box, the man selling them said, "Sorry, Ma'am, but I don't think that's a full set." I knew enough about bargaining at flea markets to respond, "Would you take $2.00 then?"

"Sure," he replied. And this single action was the start of a weird attraction that initially bred a considerable collection. Today, my collection has dwindled due to crafting as well as a slowed pursuit of the little wooden gems. At one point, I would say I had close to a dozen different styles and well over a thousand in number.

Early on, I used many of my dominoes to make jewelry pieces that I sold at craft shows and online. The jewelry niche is lucrative but challenging to maintain long-term. Just making one piece sometimes took days. Then I discovered my signature creation -- Christmas ornaments.

For the past six or seven years, I have used a considerable number of dominoes to make Christmas ornaments that I sell at a large craft show in November. Each year my collection decreases by about three hundred to five hundred making these ornaments. I even have a couple of families that place special orders with new grandchildren names and other unique requests. I have one customer who usually buys most of the ornaments I have leftover after the craft show. She has one whole tree with nothing but my ornaments, and, of course, so do I.

There was a period of time when I was going through dominoes at a reasonably good rate, so my husband and I were heading out on weekends to search for them. We would hit garage sales, flea markets, and auctions with moderate success. But there came a time I had to educate my husband on the specifics of a quality domino.

My husband sometimes makes fun of my hair-brained ideas, but the domino craft market was getting pretty lucrative, so he came on-board rather quickly. We would set out on Saturday mornings, searching for my little wooden nuggets. One time we were at a huge flea market, and he found a gigantic bag of plastic dominoes. He got all excited until I said, "I don't want those."

"Why not?" he asked.

"They are plastic. I want wooden ones."

So after that incident, I had him trained -- well, sort of.

A little while later, we were at an auction, and we separated to look at different things. When we met up, I asked my husband if he had seen any dominoes. He replied that the only ones he saw were the plastic ones I didn't like. Satisfied but disappointed, we went to find a place to stand because the bidding was about to start. A little while later, I saw the auction worker nearest me pick up an old box that looked like a domino box. Curious, I made my way through the crowd to get a better look. My jaw nearly dropped. He had a full set of Bakelite dominoes.

Quickly after I discovered what he had, they went in the air to be sold. I bid, of course. And I kept bidding until I could not justify the price for what I needed them for, so I bowed out. I made my way back over to my husband, and he was giving me this strange look. When I got to him, he said, "I thought you told me you didn't like plastic dominoes? Why were you bidding so high?"

At that point, I proceeded to educate him on the difference between the plastic dominoes and the Bakelite ones. Now, he knows wooden and Bakelite are good, plastic is not.

These days I have slowed my crafting to only the Christmas ornaments, which I love to make. I begin prepping the dominoes as early as springtime by painting or adding gold or silver antiquing to highlight the picture on the backside of the domino. I then start doing hours and hours of hand-lettering on craft paper. When I'm ready to start putting the paper on the domino, I use ModPodge and let it dry completely before adding another coat. After the second layer of ModPodge drys, I seal it with a clear spray polyurethane. I learned the hard way that the ModPodge has to seal the lettering before using the polyurethane; otherwise, the ink from the lettering runs.

After the dominoes are all decorated, the fun part starts. I mix and match dominoes and glue them together and add embellishments in some cases. I add the hooks and ribbons for hanging last. At the end of the whole process, I have three or four decent-sized boxes packed full. I usually only do one big craft show, and then the ordeal is over for another year.

This year I have a severely depleted supply of dominoes. I am thinking about not making enough for the craft show and only doing some for my repeat customers. I'm not sure I want to be stuck with four boxes of ornaments if we are not allowed to have craft shows this year. Plus, I have not been diligent in buying more dominoes for awhile. I'm thinking I might just want to save the ones I have.

These are decisions I have yet to make. However, I can say that I have not done a single thing yet in terms of prepping for the craft show season. This year is shaping up to be quite different than most in many ways.