• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • Browse Recipes
  • Resources
  • subscribe
  • Navigation Menu: Social Icons

    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • YouTube
Life Currents
Home Ā» Lawn Dice

Lawn Dice

April 8, 2015 by Debi 3 Comments

  • Share

This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission.

During the holidays my husband and I were looking through a gift catalog, and we came across a set of wooden lawn dice for sale.

And, they came in a cute bag.

We thought that they looked like lots of fun. That is, until we saw the price tag of $60. What! $60 bucks for some wooden lawn dice that we could easily make! Heck no.

DIY Lawn Dice made from scraps we had around the garage by Life Currents

So, he set out to make some Lawn Dice for us. One of my favorite things about these dice is that we spent some time on them, but in the end, these dice cost us nothing. All of the parts were found in scraps and saved things or leftover materials from other projects. And they’re awesome to play with!

These are so cool and so much fun! We spent New Year’s Eve with his family playing Lawn Yahtzee. I printed score sheets that I found here. And, it isn’t just Yahtzee that you can play with these dice. Wikipedia has a huge list of dice games.

I really want to play Phase 10 Dice. And there’s a game called Mia that sounds like fun. Most of the dice games take 5 or fewer dice, so we decided to make 2 sets of 5 dice. We were trying to decide if we wanted raw wood that was then stained, or if we wanted painted dice. So, we ended up making 1 set of each: stained wood and painted.

Want to stay healthy and active during the summer, be sure to check out my Summer Salad Recipes.

Here’s what we used and what we did…

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

Ingredients and Tools:
4×4 beam (for 5 dice you’ll need a length of beam 5 times as long as your dice plus a few inches for cuts)
measuring tape
sand paper (any grit you have will do; you just need to clean up the edges a little)
White paint (for painted ones)
black paint (for painted ones)
Black ink (for wood ones)
Stamp pad
Verathane (for wood ones)
wine cork or other round thing to stamp with (but seriously, if you can’t figure out how to get a wine cork, invite me over for dinner. I’ll help you!)
miter saw to cut beam if you don’t have a miter saw, someone in your neighborhood probably has a miter saw, ask them to cut the pieces for you and you’ll make them a set.
paint roller
cloth rag if verathaning

Here’s how we did it…

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

Measure the 4×4 beam; you’ll want the exact width so that it’s a cube. Wood measurements may be nominal terms (meaning that it doesn’t necessarily measure 4×4).

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

Make a squaring cut at the beginning of the 4×4.

Homemade Lawn Dice

Homemade Lawn Dice

Cut the lengths to match the widths. Cut each cube, then measure again. Don’t make all your marks first, because you’ll want to account for the cuts in your measurements.

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents
Hey! It’s our first dice!

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents
Don’t worry if the wood has some knots or cracks in it. The paint will cover most of those, and hey, these are simple lawn dice, after all. they’re just for fun!

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

Sand the edges of the cubes.

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents
He used wine corks to prop up the dice for painting, so that the paint didn’t stick to the work surface.

Cover the work surface with a tarp or work paper or even newspaper so you don’t get paint all over the work surface.

Homemade Lawn Dice

For the painted ones Dan used 2 coats of house paint. Semi-gloss or gloss is going to be better than flat paint if you’re going to be throwing these outside. The flat paint will get stained more quickly. He said he would’ve preferred to use Kilz primer over house paint, but since we didn’t want to go to the store to buy anything more, we used what we had. He painted 4 sides of the dice, and let that dry so that there was a place to hold the dice while the sides were wet.

Then he painted the 2 other sides and let that dry. And repeated the whole process again: 4 sides, dry, 2 sides, dry. Sounds like it would take a bit of time, but the paint dried pretty quickly, so it was a quick process, and he kept his fingers clean and the dice free of finger prints.

For small projects like this, Dan doesn’t use a paint tray. He dips the end of the paint roller into the paint bucket and smears it around. Then he rolls over the wet paint to even it out. And, a paint roller is preferable to a paint brush so there’s no brush lines in the dice.

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

A note on the dots for the numbers: Dice do have a specific arrangement of numbers, so be sure to match your dots to a manufactured dice.

We experimented with several round things to stamp with. In the end, we found that the synthetic wine cork worked best. We used Barefoot Sauvignon Blanc for our cork! Then, stamp the dots on the sides. He free-handed the positions of the individual dots using acrylic paint. If the dot doesn’t come out perfectly, you can go back and fill in with additional paint using a small craft brush.

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

For the stained wood dice, he determined that ink worked better for the dots than paint. He used an old ink pad with black ink and stamped the synthetic wine cork onto the ink. The ink worked much better than paint directly on the wood. Stamp the ink dots on the raw wood, then use a cloth rag to verathane the cube.

Homemade Lawn Dice | Life Currents

That’s it! a few cuts, a little paint or verathane, and you have some fun Lawn Dice!

DIY Lawn Dice made from scraps we had around the garage by Life Currents

  • Share

Filed Under: Gifts Tagged With: Crafts & Sewing, gift, Gifts, upcycle

You May Also Like

square crop of two mason jars filled with aromatic things.
Simmer Pot
a glass jar filled with coffee sauce and some has spilled over the side, there's a spoon to the right.
Coffee Sauce
square crop of carrot Easter eggs in a white ceramic egg holder with green Easter grass around them.
Carrot Easter Eggs
about debi

ABOUT DEBI

Hello! I’m Debi, the girl behind Life Currents where I write about mainly healthy vegetarian dishes. My husband eats meat, so occasionally I share some of his dishes as well. And, I’ll share tasty treats and projects that we do. Read more...

Previous Post: « Easter Menu 2015
Next Post: Cinnamon Sore Throat Tea »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Culinary Ginger

    April 8, 2015 at 11:56 am

    He did a fantastic job, good for you making your own. They look so good you could go into the wooden dice business šŸ™‚

  2. Sophia @ NY Foodgasm

    April 8, 2015 at 12:20 pm

    OMG what a fun idea for summer games! Even drinking games šŸ˜‰

  3. Rachel Rockwell

    April 7, 2016 at 4:34 pm

    I love this idea! So fun!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Hi! I’m Debi, the girl behind Life Currents, where I write about mainly healthy vegetarian dishes with some great desserts and other goodies mixed in! Read More >>>

Most Popular Recipes

square crop of a bowl of lemon cottage cheese pudding with a spoon on the side.
square crop looking down into a baking dish filled with pepper jelly topped cheese dip with crackers on the right.
square crop of creamy dressing in a glass jar with fresh cilantro and limes around it.
looking down on a bowl with two scoops of coconut sorbet in it.
square crop looking down on a small white bowl filled with ranch and surrounded by vegetables and a lemon wedge.
a Chocolate Cream Cheese Cupcakes with a bite missing so you can see the filling.
A chip that's been dipped in cheese and the bowl of cheese is behind it.
looking fown in a cast iron skillet filled with White Bean Sun-Dried Tomato Gnocchi and a wooden spoon sticking out.
a white bowl filled with rice pudding that's topped witha s prinkle of cinnamon and there's a spoon in the pudding.

Footer

SEEN ON

as seen on

This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission.

This month’s featured recipes: Bourbon Banana Bread, Crescent Roll Chicken Squares, Pecan Pie Muffins, and Flourless Chocolate Cookies.

Want to tip me? You can Buy Me a Coffee! And thanks!

© 2025 lifecurrentsblog.com. All rights reserved. Find my Privacy Policy Here.

  • Pinterest
  • Facebook
  • Flipboard
  • Mix
  • Threads
  • X
  • Email