Decoupaged Wood Butterfly Garland/Spring Inspired.

I’m so excited about the coming Spring. When on the the hunt for some new faux florals, I came across this cute pack of eight wood butterflies which included a string to hang them as garland. At the same time I found some beautiful floral napkins on Etsy and I started planning my next project.

For $3.00 these were definitely coming home with me:)

The napkins were approximately $.80 a piece and I purchased 6 of them. I knew I would want extra ones for future projects.

After lightly sanding off any rough areas, I painted the wood forms, on the front and back, with white acrylic paint. This will enable the soft colors on the napkins I planned on decoupaging the butterflies with to pop and is also a good base coat for the paint and poly I was going to use on the backs.

The wood was very absorbent so I ended up applying two coats of the white paint onto both sides of all eight pieces.

I used ArtMinds Decoupage Glue to attach the napkins to the wood forms.

• Make sure when decoupaging with napkins you remove all the layers from the back. Many have two other plies behind the front piece.
• Decoupage glue tends to be a bit thick and can be difficult to work with when decoupaging with napkins. Poor a little glue into a bowl mix in a little bit of water to make it easier to spread.

Once the napkins were glued on I spread an even layer of glue over the tops of each butterfly.

To set the glue quickly and help to smooth out any wrinkles I baked these pieces. I do this to anything I decoupage that fits into my oven.

• Place the item(s) on a parchment lined baking sheet into a cold oven.
• Turn the oven on to the lowest setting. Mine is 170 degrees.
• Once the preheat is finished turn the oven off and let the piece(s) cool and set in the oven for one hour.

Once cooled I used a light grit sandpaper to clean off the extra paper from the edges of the butterflies.

• When sanding scrape back away from the paper so as to not lift the edges of the freshly glued image. (For example: scrape from the front of the butterflies to the back.)

To further set the napkins I applied a thin layer of DecoArt Matte Varnish. I like to use this product because it has only a 30 minute dry time.

I painted the back of the forms in a deep purple and a leaf green using acrylic paint. Both colors required two coats. I brought the back color around the edges to show a bit on the front using small round foam brushes. I used a tapping motion with a small amount of paint on the foam.

I liked these simple so once the paint was dry I sealed the fronts and backs with glossy triple thick.

After the Triple Thick set I decided to add one more element onto the flower side of the butterflies.

I had some Ranger brand liquid pearls in gold and silver.  On the green framed butterflies I used the gold and on the purple I used the silver and made four little dots on each butterfly down the body.

I think the dots added a nice touch without being to busy or distracting from the pretty floral pattern.

The final picture above only shows six of the forms I made but there eight in total. I just hadn’t strung them yet. I wanted to demonstrate what the string looked like that had come in the package with them.

If you liked this easy project and have any questions please reach out and let me know. I will be also putting up a video on my YouTube channel, Our High Street Home.

Thank you for stopping by:)

Roni♥