Wooden Letters Decoupage

I read online to use mod podge for this decoupage project, but I didn't have any on hand.

I tried to make my own using an online recipe of 50% Elmer's glue and 50% water. That did not work. The paper never stuck to the wooden letters.

Back to square one! I ended up using Aleene's Tacky Glue (undiluted). Here's the steps I took:

The first thing I did was paint around the edges of the letters with white paint.

• I used finger paint, it's all I had on hand. It was very light, and did not cover well in places. If I do this again, I will use regular acrylic white paint.

After that was dry, I spread glue onto the letters with a paintbrush and put my paper on top, smoothed it out so there were no air bubbles, and then set them aside.

• I did NOT pre-cut the letters out of the scrapbook paper. I covered the entire letter with a rectangle of paper. Cutting will come later.

When all the letters were dry (didn't take long, in fact, by the time I was done with the last letter, the first ones were already dry. That glue is amazing) I carefully cut around the edges of each letter with a box cutter.

• I SHOULD have used a craft knife, but I couldn't find mine, and I thought "it's pretty much the same thing"... No, not really. While it did cut around the edges, there were some rough parts where the paper did not cut, it ripped the edges a little. Some parts looked really tattered.

After all the letters were cut out, I decided to stack them. Once again, I used Aleene's Tacky glue to glue them on top of each other. I was a little worried at first, because I wasn't sure if the glue would hold them together, but it did. I thought about adding some screws in the back to make it more sturdy, but it really doesn't need them.

When it was all put together, I was unhappy with some of the letters rough edges (aka, my terrible cutting). I decided to use glitter glue to outline them. Then I accented some of the letters with the glitter glue to make it look better.

That's all it took. Even though I ran into a few hiccups, I think they turned out great. I know my daughter (Vallerie) likes her name on the door. She loves to be picked up so she can point at each letter.

I know that other people probably have better ways of doing this project, but I'm happy with mine. It was quick and fun. An easy project for anyone to do.