My life is to make everything around me beautiful.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Papier Machè Bowl Making

To make a papier machè bowl, I started with this old stainless steel mixing bowl. Start by coating it with vaseline for easy release after medium has dried. I started with homosote (found in any craft store and dries very hard) or you can use medium specific for papier machè or plaster of paris. Tear up strips of newspaper or old brown craft paper. Make the paste of the medium, drag the strips of paper through it and start covering bowl. As you can see I made it less deep than the bowl and started forming a "lip" out from it and just started molding it the way I wanted it to go. Very easy.

Let it dry; take off from the bowl. Then paint it whatever color you want. I decoupaged some old paper onto it.

Curve or form it any way you like.

Bottom of bowl.

Side view

French Flowers Gift Wrap Papers

These are absolutely gorgeous papers. I bought one many, many years ago and then found the other one a few years after that. Very hard to find and expensive when you can find them all in one piece. Strangely though the 2 books have differences in the papers. Each book I have has one of the papers missing. I've only used one out of each. I keep them for the beauty but they absolutely can be used. I collected beautiful roses papers at one time but the company I bought them from in Sausalito sold the business and never did quite measure up with the new ownership. I still have some of that wrapping paper and will probably never use it all up. But I'm going to sell one of these books. All the papers are beautiful and I don't think anyone would be disappointed in either book. They are all shiny papers and are 4x the size of the book. They are perforated in. So with knowing that one of the giftwraps is gone and there are only 15 instead of 16, let me know if you'd like to purchase it. I'll be offering it on ebay starting at $25.00 and that's a very good price for the excellent condition of the papers.