Scrap wood cutting board

This weekend's project was a scrap wood cutting board! 

I was playing around with some itty bitty little scrap pieces and a chop saw, ending up with a bucket full of wood slices I wasn't quite sure what to do with.

After staring at this bucket for a while, I finally figured out what to do with them: make a scrap wood cutting board!

I needed something to secure the "tiles" to, so I found a piece of shelf board lying around and took to sanding off that horrible top coat it came with. This wasn't one of those pressed board pieces so that was a plus. It's solid wood and stable:

Next up I collected all my tiles (this is a mere fraction of them) and found all of the pieces that I could use that weren't cracked, chipped or butt ugly: 

After I found all of the tiles I liked, I began to lay them out to see how they'd look together! 

Now I missed a couple pictures here. I took the tiles back off, laid down a layer of wood glue and stuck them on the board. After the glue dried, I filled in any empty spaces (due to the fact that this was scrap wood and not perfectly cut) with a naturally shaded wood filler: 

Then the sanding began...this was a hell of a process getting each and every tile sanded perfectly enough (with a handy palm sander) so that my cutting board was flat and not randomly ridged. Because that would suck...a lot. Can you imagine getting chicken guts stuck in a ridge? Gross. But, after about a dedicated hour of sanding, it was nice and smooth. I also rounded off the edges a bit and smoothed out the corners as well: 

I wanted this board to have a little more depth in color so my next step was to stain it with a natural shade. It was light enough to show off all of the details and dark enough to bring out the knots without blackening them. Now I know what you're thinking...you stained a cutting board?? You can't cook with that!!
Oh but I can. See you at the next step: 

Two part epoxy resin. Yay! < That was a sarcastic yay. I hate this stuff, but it looks SO beautiful when it's set. It's the mixing part that I can't stand. Getting this stuff mixed right with the least amount of bubbles can be a huge ass pain. Luckily this went a lot smoother than I expected: 

I mixed up the resin and poured that sticky crap onto my board. It took me about a half hour to level the brick underneath it, since the only spot I could do this was on the floor of my garage...the dirt floor. My nerves are shot worrying about a draft blowing through and gunking up my project, but so far it's setting nicely, very level, and clean. I don't plan on putting the resin on the back, but rather using a food grade polyurethane instead or sticking with linseed oil. I'll figure that out when it comes time to flip it over.

And here she sits!:

It'll be a while before I can get a great after shot since the board needs to rest for quite some time. But, as soon as the resin dries I will update the photos. Wish me luck!!