I'm choosing decoupage as the next Bad Craft not because of its potential. Oh no - in fact, if you listen to Martha Stewart or Pinterest, you will find that decoupage is the best way to make every single thing in your home COMPLETELY AWESOME.
No, decoupage is a Bad Craft because none of us - I am firmly including myself in that category - ever actually gets around to doing it.
Let's see a show of hands: how many of you have an almost-entirely-full bottle of Mod Podge in your house right now? Extra credit if the container has never actually been opened. That stuff isn't cheap, but we all buy it with the best of intentions, and then it finds itself shuffled to the back of the cabinet.
Decoupage is our secret shame. We have such plans, don't we? I have the visible back of a cabinet that I have been planning to decoupage for at least the last five years. I know many crafters who buy things (especially cigar boxes) specifically in order to decoupage them, and then never get around to actually doing it.
It's too bad, too. Decoupage is basically a grown up version of those projects you did when you were a kid, where you would cut out neat pictures from magazines and glue them to a page. Collage is a difficult art to master, though, and it's easy to get it wrong. Which I guess is what paralyzes us and prevents us from actually doing it. What if you go to all the trouble to decoupage a butterfly onto that jewelry box, but three months later you find a better butterfly picture? The thought is as abhorrent as it is inevitable.
In fact I would hazard a guess that "unfinished decoupage projects" are the #1 source of crafting guilt among crafters. Boo, decoupage! You suck! (Sour grapes.)
Image courtesy Flickr/TaoDecoupage
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