When I did the Home Sweet Home reveals in early January I promised to show how I decoupaged all of the ugly black plastic shelves we had. It’s extremely easy to do though a little time consuming and all you need is some pretty paper, PVA glue and water.
This was the finished result of my shoe shelf:
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It started out life looking like this:
I love these shelves, they really saved us storage-wise because they were only $10, fit in the wardrobe and are strong, easily stacked and moved so you can do pretty much anything. Watch out for stray puppies trying to eat your supplies. These stray craft eating puppies are getting to be a serious problem 😉
Mix up some glue and water in a shallow bowl. I used around half water, half glue but your solution may depend on how thick your glue is. Basically you want it to be very watery but still white. Tear up pieces of pretty paper. I used wrapping paper that matched the stuff on our bedroom doors but as long as it’s not super thin you can use pretty much anything. Tear up lots of different sizes and shapes now before you get glue everywhere, much harder to tear paper when you’ve got wet gluey fingers!
Dip a piece of paper into the glue so it soaks through.
Then wrap it around the shelf. Repeat over and over again with pieces of paper until you have covered the entire set of shelves. Make sure to overlap the pieces too, this will give it extra strength. Don’t try to match up patterns, just make everything random, the key to it looking good is selecting a paper which has a patter that can blend well that isn’t too busy. Because the base of this is plastic you may have trouble getting the first couple of pieces to stick, I started on the columns and wrapped the paper around so it stuck to itself. This formed a base which I then worked out from.
I did all of the easier parts first then ripped up some much smaller pieces of paper to go over all of the details
Let the whole thing dry thoroughly then cover it all with another coat of the glue/water mix for extra strength. Easy!
Up close you can see the way the pieces just blend together.
Much cuter than the plain old black anyway and it’s quite cheap to do something like this!
And there you have it! Now I just need to get some more paper to do the couple of shelves that are left over! |
