Wednesday 18 July 2012

Music Tables


I was getting to that point with my dad and my brother of buying them gag gifts like a “Jar of Nothing” for Christmas, yes, actually paying money for a jar whose sole attribute was having nothing in it, simply because I had no idea what to get them. Enter decoupaged tables (or, in my brother’s case, a plant stand that I thought was a table).

This was my first adventure in decoupage, and in hindsight, it’s amazing that it wasn’t my last. Once I’d printed and cut my pieces of paper, I started by laying them out in various ways and taking photos so I could compare which I liked better.


It all went to hell after that.


Despite my careful planning, the pieces of paper have more gaps than a felon’s alibi, thanks to my complete inability to cut in a straight line. In some places I had to overlap more than I wanted to and lost lyrics.
  
I’d decided to use sheet music around the edges, but the edges were curved and the corners were, astonishingly, round, and the paper was too thick to be manipulated easily – I should have switched to regular paper rather than card. 


And if I’d thought the corners were bad, just wait until I got to the legs at the bottom.


If there’s some kind of round hole punch that would have helped in this situation, I want one, because I had to cut a haphazard circle, squish it around the leg, figure out roughly how much more needed to come off and hack haphazardly at it again.

I evidently had faith in my inkjet printer that bordered on the religious, because I decided to paint the heavy-duty varnish on without sealing the ink with papercraft spray varnish first. See that, erm, artistically smeared section at the top? Yeah. That’s what happens.


 But it’s the thought that counts, right?


The finished product is less than perfect, but given that it’s a table and its sole purpose is to be covered by stuff, I guess that’s okay.


Caleb had the benefit of being second, so his wasn’t quite so bad. Which you might actually have been able to tell if I hadn’t been getting slap-happy with the flash that day.


I’d learnt my lesson from Dad’s, and overlapped until gaps were physically impossible. I had fun with the middle section, since it was all songs we'd both liked and some songs we'd danced around in our underwear to. I’m not sure if this was meant to be artistically slanted or if I was still high on varnish fumes and sleep deprivation.


I do have to confess, though, I quite like the base.


So. Better than a Jar of Nothing? The jury’s still out.

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