DECOUPAGE: MASONIC BOOK

My future target is to hack Ikea Alex chest of drawers, but in order to do that quite professionally I need to start small to gain hands-on knowledge about materials and techniques I'm going to apply, to master my skills, to learn from my mistakes to move on to bigger objects.

I know I should have taken pictures of work in progress, but the idea of running a blog devoted to crafts hadn't occured to me until a couple of days ago. So the bare description will have to do.

The Masonic Book is my favourite work so far. 

I started with painting the wooden, book-shaped box the colour of cigar (my favourite acrylic paint, love the shade). Then I covered the spine with crackle vernish and let dry briefly. I rubbed all edges with a candle to make scrubing with sandpaper easier and less abrasive and applied two coats of cream matte acrylic paint to the cover and inside the box. 

Then, using the same paint and a stamp I added the handwriting on the cover, and in the inner part of the box I used a clear plastic pattern.

On top of that I decided to stick 2 images printed on an ordinary laser printer, using two different fechniques.The owl on a skull was a piece of cake. I soaked it well in water and then patted dry with a tissue and glued with decoupage glue.

The second one was more challenging. I coated the face of the image with Heritage Transfer Glaze, then soaked in water and rubbed off most of paper on the reverse. To prevent the image from getting deformed, I glued it on the book cover. Once dry I wet the image slightly and continued rubbing the image, rinsing it briefly, letting it dry  and repeated the process a couple of times. When I was finally satisfied with the result, I evened out the edges of the image with sand paper making it look old and battered at the same time. Then I ran sandpaper along all the edges, previously rubbed with a candle to give the box the vintage look I like co much. Finally I coated the whole work with matte acrylic varnish and that was done!

I must say I'm very pleased with the results. This box is a present for my mum. I hope she likes it!