The Art of Decoupage: A Crafty Students Easy Guide

Hi All!

I've been working on some hand crafts for the upcoming stall.

I'm nearly finished two chairs which my brother and I have 'made new' by decoupaging them. One is covered in old Beano comics and the other in American and Canadian 1930s period stamps.

They're looking brilliant and in the spirit of this crafty blog I've decided to share my technique with you all!

Below are some photos of my work in progress with the stamp design chair and my finished Beano chair. Enjoy!

• Start with your item - whatever it may be and make sure it is clean and dry. You could apply this technique to literally anything - boxes, furniture, frames ect ect.

• Choose the paper you want to design with. Think of things that are image heavy such as maps, magazine cuttings, stamps, sheet music or whatever else takes your fancy. Cut these up into little squares.

• Get an old jam jar that has a lid and put three parts PVA glue and one part water into it and give it a good shake.

• Paste an area of the surface you want to Decoupage with this mixture using a paint brush. Apply your squares of paper, leaving no gaps, and then paste another layer of your mixture over the paper. So your images are sandwiched between a layer of the PVA mixture ontop and below. Make sure you don't have too much mixture on your brush at anyone time as this will result in a soggy mess. You want to work thinly and evenly.

• Allow this to dry and then get a clear gloss varnish and apply this evenly all over your item. This seals the paper. You may need to do a couple of coats of this to get a nice even finish.

The stamp chair is obviously a work in progress, we'll be posting photos on completion so keep an eye out!

Feel free to comment below if you need any help or advice with this technique - I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And if you end up with some proud results let us know and we'll post them.

Both chairs above will be available for purchase at The Dubline Flea this Sunday 27th and you can check out some other items and get info about the stall here.

Happy Crafting!

Nat

xx