Octoberfest: Day 9 "DIY Decoupage Phase 1"

I have a confession: I'm selfish. You see, I want you all to like my blog so much that I'm posting things that are enjoyable to read. But I want more for you - I want you to actually learn something from this. So for tonight's activity, I started a DIY project at home that will actually have 3-4 different phases. Tonight was the getting started part. Time for another confession. Remember that time that Madonna came out with the book Truth or Dare in which she confessed everything you never wanted to know about her and her private life? Yeah this is nothing like that. The confession is that I'm a hoarder. Thankfully, I'm also guilty of exaggerating at times. So while I'm not at the TLC Hoarders: Buried Alive status YET (I mean how does ANYone get to that point?), I recognize that I do have a bit of a problem. Admitting it is the first step, right? What exactly do I hoard, you ask? I'm glad you asked that because I'm going to tell you. I hoard magazines. That's not so bad right? Except that my parents still have a wall in the upstairs bedroom that is adorned with dozens of pictures of Nick and Sharon from the Young & the Restless. Yes, I was obsessed. No I haven't outgrown it. So I watch soap operas. I mean there are worse things...

Decoupage Tables (not collector magazines here)

Back to the hoarding. I just can't get rid of magazines. Part of me says I'll read them eventually. And then the other part just keeps adding to the pile knowing full well I'm never getting to it anytime soon. But the thing is that I view some magazines as coffee table books and collector items that I just can't part with. However, then I start saying that EVERY magazine is a collector item and now you see why I have a problem. Thankfully, I also have a very artistic solution to this problem. I'm going to take my beloved magazines and cut them up (gasp!), apply them to the surface of a table, glue and then varnish. So my DIY project is to decoupage a table with magazine clippings. The finished project should look something like this picture. Then I can view the best part of those magazines as part of a functional display table. And to take the idea one step further, I can take the published magazine article I just did for dsm Magazine, "Women Who Wine," and personalize the table!

If you guys want to follow along, we're going to break out the steps in separate blogs. Tonight what I did was go through all of my old magazines that I'm keeping and I tore out the pages that I want to use for the tables. I have attached a picture of the tables starting bare so you can see how they progress throughout the project. At various times of the month, I will be coming back to this project and moving forward with the next step. If you are impatient and want to jump ahead and tackle the project in its entirety, here is a great article on how to decoupage furniture. So for this post you get humor AND a DIY project idea! See, sometimes it pays to be selfish.

Table (not done)