What would a fridge magnet made out of that stuff look like?

Here are the patterns for the letters I wanted. — The patterns for the letters I wanted to cut from the meter-square sheet of yellow astroturf.

When I spotted meter-square sheets of cheap astroturf on sale and saw that it was available in bright yellow, it occurred to me that oversized letters cut out of the stuff and turned into fridge magnets might look neat. The rolled-up bit of fake, plastic grass arrived yesterday and I set to work testing my idea tonight.

First, I chose a blocky sans serif font, printed the desired letters, glued them to flexible plastic backing, and cut them out.

The astroturf backing isn't flat and smooth but rather, as you can see, ridged and gravelly. For tracing the letters, I got by with a white liquid-chalk marker. — The astroturf backing isn’t flat and smooth but rather, as you can see, ridged and gravelly. For tracing the letters, I got by with a white liquid-chalk marker.

Tracing the letters on the astroturf backing was a bit of a pain, but I muddled through with a stubby-tipped liquid-chalk marker. The letter D shown above came out alright but not fantastic because I unwisely placed its lower right corner a tad too close to the edge of the astroturf. Cutting the material using regular scissors would’ve been hard going, so I used a pair of 3M kitchen shears. Even so, it gave the muscles in my tool-wielding hand a nice little workout.

Here are the finished astroturf letters, in a heap surrounded by scraps and stray blades of faux grass.

The letters turned out mostly fine and they looked even more interesting than I’d imagined. Insufficient stock of the sort of magnets that I want to use for this project means that I’ve turned some but not all of them into fridge magnets, so photos of the final product will have to wait for now.