Furniture Decoupage

today we are going to renew this horrible dated yellow finish using

decoupage

decoupage

is the method of attaching papers to a piece of

furniture

using an adhesive and making them part of the finish. He knew he wanted this piece to have a wood stained surface. So I started by removing the yellow finish from the top of this piece of

furniture

. It was difficult to remove it. I used a chemical stripper and it was thick and sticky and didn't scrape off once I had the entire top removed. My next steps were to remove my hardware and take it out for cleaning and then I covered my piece with a coat of dixie bell slick bar because the existing finish on this was an almost glossy slick yellow finish. the slider is a dixie bell paint tack primer that is going to give my finish something to bite into my next step is to go ahead and give it a coat of dixie bell paint in rusty nail.

I chose Rusty Nail because it's a perfect background color for the paper I plan to use in this. I felt like The front of this piece was pretty simple so I went ahead and put in some molding would you also fold from the Dixie Bell to the bottom valance of the front? Would you bend moldings? Are moldings that bend when heat is applied to them? This is a flat front so I just applied some quick thick titebond adhesive. I applied a little heat to the front and this helps it sit perfectly on the flat front of my piece.

Here we are at the end of the second day. I have a layer of rusty nail all over my body. Could you bend the molding? It's attached and I'm ready to start attaching my paper to this piece. Okay, the next step on this dresser that we're going to do behind me is we're going to go ahead and add the decoupage paper, so I chose this paper. This is what my entire piece was inspired by. This is from Roy. He cycled and I put a base coat on my rusty nail. I chose the rusty nail because it is similar to the colors they are. on the paper, when you wet it for decoupage, it will make the paper a little translucent, so the color you choose you should consider that you will be able to see under the dark colors with light papers.

They're usually not very friendly, let me show you what supplies I pulled out to go ahead and do my decoupage, so first thing, most importantly, I need my adhesive, so I like to use wallpaper paste. This is the Roman brand wallpaper paste that I chose. This at Lowe's is pretty cheap. You can also use any of your digital clear layers as a decoupage medium. I'm not using them because they harden a little faster and this gives me a little more time working with the paper. We're going to use my wallpaper paste and then I have a brush, of course, to apply it.

I have a brayer and a brayer is a roller tool. I have a few of these and I like each of them for a slightly different reason, so I just pick them up when I see them. This one is made of rubber so it's nice and soft, but this will help me flatten the paper and get those bubbles out when I put it down. I have a razor, um, you want to make sure this is really sharp because we're going to cut some paper. I got out a tape measure because I want to measure the placement of the paper in my drawers, a rag, and then some paper towels.

So that's all my supplies that I pulled out, so the first thing I did was lay out my paper. Now it's two sheets, one right on one left side and they meet in the middle and I want that seam to fall in the center of my piece and all I did there was I went ahead and took a tape measure and measured the center of my drawer that falls right here, let me talk to you a little bit about what my plan is as it stands. When placing this paper, I try to place it dry and make sure I have a rough idea of ​​where I want to place it before I start adding moisture to the paper.

Once I add moisture to the paper, my play time becomes limited. So what I'm seeing here is that I have this crack in my piece, this little piece of molding, and what I think I'm going to do is hide the edge of my paper by tucking it in. that crack and then I'm going to paint around the edges to match that's what I'm thinking I'm going to do and if I hold this up to where the center of my drawer is it's going to go all the way on the other side so let me show you that here so I know that my paper is going to be long enough and then I know I'm going to have to cut it here at the bottom, but I plan to use this other one. piece on the bottom here to go ahead and wrap the sides of my furniture to give me an idea of ​​what the design is going to look like before I start cutting it out or laying it out okay so the first thing I'm going to do I have my paper laid out here on the front of my drawer.

I went ahead and lowered my drawer so it was a horizontal surface instead of trying to work on it on my dresser, it will only make it easier to work on. I'm going to come in here with my knife, I have a ruler here and I'm going to go ahead and cut my paper to the size of this drawer. I'm going to cut it a little bigger. just fractions of an inch larger so I can make sure I have extra paper to work with. This is where that little ridge is on the piece, so I'm going to skip that and then I'm going to come here and I'm going to cut it out.

I'm using those molding lines as a guide and I'm just going to cut it to the edge of that molding. I make sure I get a nice straight line. I try to cut the paper a lot. that I'm working on smaller sheets instead of trying to work on this huge sheet, which is great, so let's go ahead and remove this and this should be my first sheet here, I need to cut it right where it is. The ridge of that piece was and then I can go ahead and start attaching this okay, so from here I'm going to go ahead and attach my paper, so now that I have my dry fit, I have my cut piece.

I'm going to go back and apply some of my wallpaper paste. I'm just going to go from the center of the drawer, where I marked my center because that's where I know I want this paper to line up and it just needs to. quite a thin layer, you don't really need to apply it a little, it's very useful. I'm going to go down into this crevice here and I like to work small areas at a time, so if this was a big, huge drawer. face, I would only apply the paste to a small portion at a time, so a nice thin layer all over my forehead making sure to get into that crevice where I want the edge of my paper to be nice and smooth, even one layer, all good and that gives me a little bit of moisture to go ahead and work now I'm going to start applying my paper.

I'm going to go ahead and fold it so you're only working with half of it once you start wetting the paper. I really want to, you really want to try to put it in there. I'm going to line it up with my center point on the drawer door. I'll make sure I have it placed evenly from top to bottom and then I'll do it slowly. I'm going to work my way through this piece, I'm just going to use my hand, I'm going to come back and use my brayer in just a minute and we're going to go down into this crack right here and I can see right away the moisture is starting to wrinkle. my paper so I want to make sure I get them out so let's get nice and close so you can see the wrinkles coming out of the paper okay so I'm as close as I can get while I'm still working on this and I'm going to grab my brayer and I'm going to remove these wrinkles.

I'm finding that this one isn't getting the contact I want and that's why I like having multiple brayers. I know what each one is. works better, this one is a little softer, although the ruler sometimes falls off the handle, so I don't like this one for that reason, but I like the contact it gets now, the paper stretches a little when wet, so that some of the wrinkles, the fine, fine wrinkles will take care of themselves as my paper dries and then I'm going to go ahead and let this fall all over the front of my piece and now I'm going to go ahead and spread out the All of this, make sure that it has good contact with my wallpaper paste, okay, and then I'm going to use my fingers and I'm just going to tuck in the edge of my paper.

I remember wanting it to fall right into those cracks in me. drawer, I'm just going to push the paper into that molding using my fingernail to press it down. My intention is to paint the edges so that you can't see where this paper ends. That's my intention with this, okay and let's go. go ahead and remove some more of these wrinkles, it's pretty flat, although there's not really much there, I've got one right here, I can pull them out with my fingers, one right there, go down into that crack and then across it. Right now I can go ahead and just mark my paper right below this line, just give it a little cut and that way I'm not going to try to go up this ridge with a sheet of paper, it's going to be flat here I am. not even cutting all the way through and I'm just giving a little score on that crack very lightly, that's why you want to have a nice sharp blade on your cutting tool when you're doing this right and that's it.

Nice and flat too, so I feel like this piece of paper sits nicely on the front of my piece. Okay, the next thing I need to do is go ahead and cut out my second sheet of paper. I'm going to line it up. my center point and then I need to cut it up to this edge as well, so I'm just going to line it up, grab my ruler, I've got my pocket knife here again with a nice sharp blade and I'm I'm just going to cut right along the edge of my ruler. I'm using this slit as a guide.

I'm going to do the same thing here that we did on the other side and I'm going to go ahead with my brush and I'm going to apply my wallpaper paste in a thin, even layer, like I said, a little goes a long way, you want to make sure you don't have nothing, there is a small speck of dust or hair or something that can be seen. because this is a very thin paper, so you want to make sure the surface is nice and clean and that any little bumps or bumps there are removed before you start putting the paper down.

I want to make sure that I don't have a place there where my painting is going to be seen and then I can start to figure this out. To start, I'm just going to use my hand because the paper is nice and dry, once it gets wet it's more likely to tear. then you want to stop using your hand if you don't have to. I'm going to use my brayer and I'm going to spread this out slowly as I go. I'm going to roll it horizontally and vertically. I'm going to press this paper into the crack, it's going to roll down this little molding here and then I'm going to come back and start running it over the next one, and I'm going to do it with my brayer.

Well, I want to make sure I include this center bar. I don't want there to be a gap in my pattern for this to show on my piece. I want to make sure I put my role here and then it will continue. Moving on to the next drawer below, I really love using decoupage finishes. It's a really great way to add any variety of prints to the front of your piece, so think about any prints you can get on a sheet of paper. You can really add it. to a piece of furniture, in this case I'm using thin tissue paper, but this also works for posters, it works for photographs, it works for wallpaper, so there are any number of paper prints that you can put on your piece of furniture, even napkins. paper work.

I like the same technique regardless of the thickness of the paper, if my paper was a little thicker the only difference it would make is that I go back and forth, buttering my paper as well. Once the paper is up, I let the wallpaper paste dry overnight. and then I'll go back and apply a layer of Dixie Belt clear coat over the top of my paper, this encapsulates it and makes it a permanent part of my furniture and around the edges of my paper, so I just had some areas where my paper was not covering and I want to camouflage this so that you don't even notice that the paper is not there.

So what am I doing if you want to look down here in this drawer? These are all the colors I see in this newspaper, so I have kale, holy guacamole, palmetto, uh, those are my greens. I have rusty nail, apricot seed mustard and midnight sky. I'm not really using the flamingo so I'm going to go ahead and set them aside so these eight colors and I'm doing them between these three brushes so I chose three brushes and the reason I did that is because I have one that I'm using with my greens. I have one that I'm using with my remaining colors and then one that goes in yellow and then the blue goes in the green brush, so this is what I'm doing: I'm going to dive in and look I look at what's on the edge of my paper , so here I see that this would match my cabbage leaves, so I'm going to come over here and I'm going to rub this in now. put some colors on top of this, but I want to go ahead and just get a bottom layer and then I can go in and stipple.

Stippling is just when you use your brush in a stippling technique, so I'm just stippling. a little bit on the base of my rusty nail and it's okay if it peeks out because that's the main background color on this paper. This is my brush with my apricot, so I'm going to fill that spot and let's go ahead and get a little spot of apricot here as well. I'll let them dry just for a minute in the meantime, I'll stop by here if you fill it around some decoupage paper that doesn't have to match exactly right, it just has to look convincing enough, so I've already done the whole bottom row here and I feel like if you look at it you can't tell that's painted on this also helps camouflage theedge of my paper.

So I'm going to go ahead and keep painting it around this and I think once you're done, once I'm done with the piece, you won't even be able to tell where the paper ends and the little dots that I've painted it in and around it, but those are my top tips: look up what colors you see in the body color here, try to analyze it if you don't have all the colors in the dixie belt line, you can bring them out with acrylic paints. Um, little acrylic paints and you can paint around a piece of paper.

This also works with transfers. If you have a transfer that is too small for the body of your piece, you can paint around it and make it appear larger than it really is. For all my wood surfaces I used a Dixie Belt coffee bean wash. The coffee bean is a rich, rich brown and I diluted it so it adheres to the wood almost like using a wood stain. I also ended up painting the lower valance on this one. piece to match the decoupage paper and then added my rusty nail paint to the sides of my drawer, some black hardware that was spray painted, and some gold wax on my "Would You Be?" and this piece is finished if you enjoyed this video I hope you will click the subscribe button.

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