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!