Greetings from Calgary everyone!  Staying on top of my blog while I’m away.  Here’s one that I recently finished up before my trip.

I picked up this pretty little tray at Goodwill for $4.99.  I liked how basic and simple it was, a perfect blank canvas for a redesign.

I had no direction in which to take the tray until I saw these squares of silver papers with a red leaf print.  I loved the paper and had no idea what I’d do with them initially, but bought out their remaining stock of 6×6 sheets and took them home.  That’s when the leaf paper and the tray found love.

As I bought the paper from my favorite craft stores in Vancouver, Urban Source (see my quick review here), there just wasn’t enough material to cover the entire tray.  Actually, that’s not true.  I did have enough to cover the bottom of the tray IF I didn’t want to pattern match.  But, of course, I did.

I almost scrapped the project entirely because I was so fixated on pattern matching and short on materials.  Then I found a solution and it was all systems go from there.

Basically, I concentrated my pattern matching in the center of the tray.  I had enough paper to do a square in the center, then I kept a 1/4″ black border around the square and filled the remaining border with leftover paper, without pattern matching.

All the paper was glued down using Mod Podge.  After that, I took some black paint to touch up the knicks around the edges.  Looks in much better shape now!

Unfortunately, I used too much glue in certain areas and created a transparency in the paper.  Had no idea this would be a problem until the glue dried.  It’s not exactly a deal breaker as there will be accessories to cover them.  Out of curiosity, does anyone know how to fix this problem.  If it can be fixed, I’d love to take advantage of it and make this tray perfect.

Supplies used:

Tray
Decorative paper
Mod Podge
Black acrylic paint
Painter’s brush

Total time:  A lot of hemming and hawwing went into this project as I tried to figure out the best solution for the lack of materials.  Hands on time after coming up with the solution was about 1.5 hours.  There was a lot time involved in pattern matching and coming up with the final size of the center square.  Glue down went really fast as was the paint touch up.  If I didn’t have to pattern match, I could’ve knocked this out within half an hour.  Total does not include dry time.

Total cost:  The tray was $4.99 and the paper was $0.75 each.  The paint was leftover from previous projects.  Final total was $11.46.

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