Hand Carved San Francisco Mahjong Set

It was only a year ago that I started playing mahjong with my friends, but it quickly became one of my favorite hobbies. We loved not only teaching various friends and playing the game itself (it’s actually quite simple to get started) but also collecting various mahjong sets. Alex and I found ourselves scouring vintage shops and antique fairs for old sets and soon ended up with five different sets of our own. They come in so many different materials and variations, each beautiful in their own way. I soon started thinking, maybe I could make my own mahjong set? And that’s how I ended up making my own San Francisco-themed mahjong set. 144 wooden tiles and three dice, each hand carved, painted, and varnished. I chronicled the whole journey on my instagram story highlights @makelearndo, but you can also take a look at the  process below.

The process started all the way back in October last year. First, I brainstormed a bunch of different possible themes for the tiles before landing on “San Francisco” as the theme. I had help brainstorming the different illustrations that would fit within that San Francisco theme. Then I sketched all of the tiles, going through quite a few different drafts for some of them. For instance, the fortune cookies started off as crabs, but they became too spidery once they started multiplying.

I also spent a long time researching possible tile materials and eventually decided on custom sized wooden tiles made by GandMfinewoodwork on Etsy. I made a little paper mockup to help decide on the size of the tiles (not too big or small, and able to stand on its own), and I waited a couple of weeks for the tiles to arrive from Greece. Perfect!

Then I had to finalize all of my drawings. It took a while to decide on my Golden Gate Bridge (the ? tile), and it took especially long to finalize Karl the Fog (white board), which went through many possible iterations before landing on the wavy line version below.

I had originally just thought I would only paint the tiles, but then I started wondering if I could also carve the wooden tiles before painting them. Having never tried such a thing, I did my online research and landed on getting this Dremel Stylo+ tool to try it out. It comes with various engraving bits, and of course I ended up using the tiniest ball head.

I also bought this little wooden vice from Amazon, since I was thinking it might be hard to hang on to a tiny block while also spinning a cutting bit right next to your fingers. The little wooden vice is made for carving Chinese seals, like the traditional name stamps. It was perfect! Here were my first tiles, before I realized that I was only supposed to make one seal and not four of them, alas.

I had printed my line drawings to scale, so for each tile I improvised a carbon transfer to trace the drawing onto the tile, going over it again in pencil, and then I carvrd it with the Dremel. I repeated this for all 144 tiles (and actually, it was 153 tiles since I carved 9 extras on accident).

Progress with tracing and with carving.

Here is my mockup of the potential paint colors. Muted rainbow, of sorts.

Scouting out potential acrylic colors… and then I ended up improvising slightly upon arrival at the FLAX art store, where artists’ acrylics were conveniently on sale!

The actual paints I went home with. The little plastic paint pots were very handy for the colors that I ended up mixing. The paints miraculously stayed usable even months later when I came back to paint the dice.

I was even carving my tiles while on vacation in Tahoe.

Finally time to begin painting! Here’s one of my extra quails that became a test tile for my colors.

I made the Karl the Fog tiles the palest blue-white so that it’s nearly invisible, which I sort of love.

Gold for the gold bars, and orange for the Chinese numbers (these are traditionally the wan (?) tiles).

Partly painted!

I experimented with some multi toned tiles but ultimately decided against it.

Had to get a new brush partway through, and the painting continues!

Finally, all 144 tiles are carved and painted! Pretty wild.

Cassie came shopping with me for pins (for my drying rack), varnish, and brushes. I rigged a simple drying rack with wax paper layered over one of my foam blocking boards (for knitting).

Then I started varnishing, one coat at a time. Here’s my count of how many coats have been applied. It’s a long process, requiring a couple hours of drying between.

I ended up doing 4 coats total, and then sandpapering with extra fine sandpaper to smooth it back out, since the wood grain had popped when varnish had been applied, making the tiles rougher than they started.

It was only halfway through the tile making process that I began thinking about making dice to go with the set too. I purchased a set of pre-made blank wooden dice from the BoardGameGeek store. Very cute. I did not do this very scientifically at all, just looked up one possible ‘correct’ dice layout (apparently there are a few!) and sketched it on, replacing the ‘one’ side with a crab.

Carved, painted, and varnished all in one day! Three little dice was so much easier to make than 144 intricate tiles!

 

I have also thought a lot about what kind of box to make for my mahjong set, and I have looked at a lot of potential pre-made boxes and chests that could potentially be the exact right size. However, after having finished all of the tiles, I decided to wait to make the box at a later date. So for now, I made some temporary paper trays just to keep the set together in the meantime! They’re actually pretty cute already.

And just like that, we got to try out this San Francisco mahjong set in San Francisco with our friends!

Thank you for helping me to inaugurate my set, Steph, Cassie, John, and Alex!

So fun to see it in use. I even won a round.

One more introduction of the set with my Mandarin & mahjong group too!

Very happy. I loved this whole projects and of course already have many ideas on what I could do differently if I ever gathered the energy to make another mahjong set in the future. And of course I still need to make this set a box at some point. But I’m very happy to enjoy this unique wooden San Francisco-themed set for now!

Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She compulsively documents and blogs all of her daily adventures. Follow her arts & crafts on instagram @makelearndo and her photography @annawuphoto and view more of her work at annawu.com. Contact her to book your own session today.