Canvas Decoupage Creations

I started scrapbooking when I was in middle school, but these days, I don’t make much time to do it. When I go home to visit my family though, I can’t pass up on the opportunity to raid my mom’s MEGA scrapbooking stash. My mom picked up the hobby with several of her friends at work and now attends workshops, retreats and scrapbooking events. She has an entire room filled with tools, stickers, circle cutters, ink pads, buttons, ribbons and stacks upon stacks of velum and other assorted papers. It’s a kid in the candy store moment for me every time I sort through her materials; there’s always some small embellishment that catches my eye and inspires me to create a new page that I hadn’t planned to work on.

When my mom asked me if I wanted to go to a workshop taught by a friend of hers from her scrapbooking group during my last visit home, I immediately said yes. The focus of the class was on decoupage. We all met on a Friday afternoon and sat through a quick tutorial on the art of decoupage. Our teacher brought in the blue dress piece (above) as inspiration; she also brought all of the stamps and supplies to recreate the dress on canvas (plus a bunch of other materials for us to use liberally). Our teacher demonstrated great patience and skill in helping to explain techniques to us, oftentimes repeatedly.

First, we painted the sides of our canvas, and then came the hard part. We had to decide what we wanted to focus on as subject material. I was drawn to the clocks and time-related pieces that our instructor had in her magic bag of supplies. I was particularly taken by this quote from Sidney J. Harris: “The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.” Amen. My mom decided to create an artwork similar to the instructor’s, using a stamp set and some delicate folding to recreate the 3D layers of the dress. We sat for hours chit chatting, working on our individual canvases, admiring others’ works in progress and snacking. With the help of a little Mod Podge, which we used to secure all of our paper, trinkets and ribbons, we each walked home with a mini masterpiece. :)

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