Last saturday we returned from a trip to San Antonio, Texas. Unfortunately, the reason for the trip was to say goodbye to my sweet grandfather and to celebrate his amazing life. Rather than just fly in for the ceremony and out the next day, my family chose to stick around for a couple of days and take in all of San Antonio and even Austin (which is beautiful!)

I hadn’t been back to Texas since I was pretty young so I really felt like I was seeing everything again for the first time. It’s amazing how different things look from a child’s eyes. For example, I now completely understand why they say, “Remember the Alamo.” It’s because the Alamo is soooo much smaller then any tourist would EVER expect. But, once you get over the shock of its size, it really is pretty cool.

One thing that Texas (especially a city like San Antonio) is known for is their Tex-Mex style in decor and household items (which are often one in the same for me). At the El Mercado in San Antonio there were dozens of little shops with handmade and hand painted pottery and tiles. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had to take 2 flights with 2 children, we would have come home with a whole new dinnerware set…and then some! Instead, we opted to grab just a few of the unique tiles as souvenirs.

You’re probably wondering why on earth we would grab 4 loose tiles. Well, I really wanted to bring some home (they’re just so gosh darn pretty) and I figured, once home, I could make something useful/practical out of them. I had seen tiles being made into coasters and trivets before so that’s where my thoughts were leading when we bought these.

I already had some cork so I just cut it into approximately 3.5″ X 3.5″ squares. They didn’t have to be perfect, they just had to be perfect enough to be hidden on the backside of the 4″ X 4″ tiles. (FYI, felt pads work well too, you know the ones you use under furniture?)

Then I hot glued the cork to the back side of each tile

Finally, just to be sure the cork was on well, I filled up my tea kettle and added a little bit of extra pressure for a few minutes.

The end result is 4 beautiful, unique and meaningful coasters. My only regret is that I didn’t get more of them to make a coordinating trivet! However, I got over that when I quickly realized that by putting all 4 coasters together, I had an amazing trivet!

I feel like I need to go back to Texas JUST to shop at El Mercado again! Thankfully I have family there so I have a fantastic excuse to head that direction.