Decoupage with Printables

Note: This post contains affiliate links. I may receive a commission if you buy something after clicking on a link in this article. 

If you've been in the printables world lately, you may have noticed some of the pretty images and papers out there. Maybe you've thought to yourself, "This would be great for my next decoupage project. " Maybe you found something lovely on a vintage ephemera sight, or maybe you discovered a set of beautiful printable papers, but you aren't into scrapbooking or junk journaling. Maybe, like me, you enjoy making your own papers. In any case, the problem of printing arises. If you have a color printer at your house and aren't daunted by the cost of keeping your printer in colored ink, you can resort to some of the hacks people use to print on tissue paper or napkins. But if you don't have your own color printer (or don't want to try those tricks for printing on napkins) you have a conundrum. Is it possible to use ordinary printer paper for decoupage? Isn't it too thick? While I will admit that printer paper will probably never be ideal for decoupage, you can use it, and there's even a trick for making it thinner so it works better! Read on. 

One of my latest designs is a set of Easter/spring papers with eggs, birds' nests, and spring blossoms, on various pastel backgrounds. I was really pleased with them, and decided it would be nice to use some of them for a decoupage project. I thought the design quite fitting for Easter eggs, and I also thought it would look nice on a box. Since it is expensive to color print on one's own printer, I had my papers printed out at a copy shop (I also think they have a better printer). Although I asked for the thinnest paper they had, the result was still a bit thick for decoupage, especially decoupage eggs. The pattern, also , was a bit large for eggs. I bought large styrofoam eggs, larger than chicken eggs, but probably smaller than ostrich ones (I think). I also bought a wooden box and decoupage glue. 

I was still a bit stumped by the question of how I would go about decoupaging the eggs given the thickness of the paper. A few keystrokes later, I had an answer: 

I decided to use the tape method to thin out three out of six of my sheets of paper. I had printed out three of my designs, two copies of each. I thought I would only thin out the paper I intended to use for the eggs. Before using the tape method on my printouts, I practiced on a scrap. The method worked, well, but I found that it did not always work evenly. I generally found that I needed to do it more than once to get the results I wanted. The paper did not always thin evenly, so I sometimes ended up thinning up smaller areas. It was possible to get the paper so thin that, in places, I could see the front design on the back of the paper. It never really reached quite the quality of tissue paper, although I might have been able to get it down to that had I dared.