Project #4 (and a half?)

I have a new end table and I wanted to get the drawer organized, but I didn't have anything on hand. I went to the Dollar Store and found a divided server that I thought would work. I bought 2 of them, brought them home, and popped them in the drawer. Well, huh. They were a little big, but I could still put stuff in them and get the drawer closed, so no biggie.

                                     My drawer minus organization.

               The trays are actually sitting on the top of the drawer sides.

I got tired of that pretty quickly, so when I was at Meijer this afternoon, I grabbed some bowls that were on clearance (for $1.74), with the intention of decoupaging them, so it didn't really matter that they were all Disney-Princess-ified.

I had a couple of books,which I bought at an estate sale, that were in my pile to go to Goodwill, which I decided to keep and use for decoupage. For this project, I used Eugenics and Sex Harmony; Banish Fear and Sex Ignorance Forever! by Dr. Herman H. Rubin, M.D. (author of Your Mysterious Glands and Glands and Health), published in 1942. If you're not familiar with the word, "eugenics" is basically selective breeding for humans. Some day, I'm going to use the dust cover for a project.

                                    Random pages from the book.

          I trimmed the blank edges from the pages, then tore the pages into
                                           horizontal strips.

                            I applied the strips in a spiral pattern.

               This is all the Podge that I peeled off my fingers afterward.

        Imagine that all of the bowls have been decoupaged and that the
                     used-up checkbook isn't there. Isn't it lovely?

Oy.

I'm going to need another dictionary.

I started a project tonight. It didn't go well. I was making it for a friend; her last name starts with S, so she wanted a canvas, smaller than the one I made for myself, with pages of words that start with S. I ran out of pages! Luckily, it was sucking anyway, so it's not a big deal that I ran out of supplies.

Also, I'm getting low on Mod Podge, so I made my own "decoupage medium" -- I mixed Elmer's Glue-All with water. What? I read it on the internet! If it's on the internet, it's true, right? Right? Say yes, dammit! Some sources said to use a 1:1 ratio, others said 2:1 (water:glue). I started with the 1:1 and it seemed really thin, so I added more glue, so I ended up at about  1.5:1 (glue:water). It was still too wet; which may have led to Problem Number 2 (3?): lumps/wrinkles. I tried to smooth them out, but they're very persistent. I even used a Popsicle stick (actually, I "borrowed" some tongue depressors from work -- what Popsicle sticks want to be when they grow up) to smooth the paper, like the internet said to do. No joy. So Kim's going to have to wait for me to 1) get another dictionary and 2) get more Podge. (On a side note, you can buy Podge by the GALLON at their web site. You know, in case you've got a really big project.)

                    Kim's lumpy project, with a Popsicle stick stuck to it

So, I'm a blogger. And a decoupager.

Who knew? For the last several years, I've been searching for my craft. Scrapbooking, for whatever reason, never really appealed to me. I tried cake decorating. Christmas ornaments. Beading. Photography. Crochet. Sewing. Those knitting loom things. Magnets. In the process, I would estimate that I've spent about $1,000 on supplies; supplies that I still have, that are still crowding me out of my 700 square foot apartment. About 2 weeks ago, I tried decoupage for the first time.

Well, not the first time. I first decoupaged about 4 years ago, during my Christmas ornament period. It didn't last. But last month, I did my first large project. It's an artist's canvas, about (16 inches?) square and I decoupaged pages from an old dictionary onto it. It's kind of lumpy, but I love it. I chose dictionary pages with words that I like and centered them around the heading of the "A" section.

My second project was a wooden star that I picked up at Michael's. I used pages from the same dictionary, but tore them into smaller pieces to fit all the weird angles on the star. By the time I started that one, I'd done some research online and I did a better job with it. It's not lumpy, and I sanded it very lightly with a fine-grained sandpaper before I put on the second coat of Mod Podge. Then it went downhill when I sprinkled the wet Podge with glitter.  The glitter might have worked, if I'd used the right glitter, but I used a chunky glitter that just doesn't do anything at all for the star. Eventually, I sand off the glitter and put a couple more layers of Podge on it and call it good. I think it'll still look OK.

                             Can you see the large pieces of glitter?




I started my third project tonight. A couple of months ago I bought a paper mache box at a craft store (either Michael's or Hobby Lobby . . . they're my standbys) with the intention of either painting it or decoupaging it with cleverly-cut scrapbook paper. Instead, I used circles punched from a 2010 calendar -- lots of pretty pictures of flowers. So far, I've only done the lid, but it looks pretty good.

The projects I've done so far have satisfied a couple of different crafty urges. I get to use glue, for one thing. And I've worked with books, which I love (on a side note, yes, I did feel a small twinge of guilt when I tore the dictionary apart, but I told myself that it wasn't as terrible as I was making it out to be because the spine of the book was broken before I bought it and the book would have fallen apart anyway). And it's a recycled craft, so I love that.

                                          Future Projects


So I'm here to take you along on my decoupage adventures. I think this might actually be the craft that sticks (HA! a little decoupage joke there!) with me. Or that I stick with. Whichever. Feel free to read along and learn from my mistakes. Or help me correct the mistakes I make. And I will make plenty of mistakes, I promise!