Painted Doilies as Wall Art

Hello creative souls!

I have a craft tutorial for you today to make some wall art using doilies. The fun thing about this one is that it's easy to do but looks really effective. And if you're a craft hoarder collector like me, you might just have some doilies lying around waiting for the perfect craft to upcycle them!

This tutorial recently appeared on Alisa Burke's blog. I like to post my tutorials here too so that you can find all my crafty projects under the one roof, so to speak. 

So, here's how you do it...

Painted Doilies as Wall Art

I had some lovely friends share their doily collections with me for this tutorial. It's great when others share their stashes with you for crafts sake!

For this project you will need:

-A collection of crocheted doilies
-PVA glue
-acrylic paints

The original doilies before receiving their make-over

First, I dipped my doilies into water and then wrung them out so that they were damp when I painted them. This makes them easier to paint. If the doilies are dry when you start they will just draw so much of the paint and water out of your brush that you will find you are forever adding more paint.

I watered down my acrylic colours to make them work more like watercolours. You’ll get a feel for how runny to make the paint once you start. Keep in mind your doilies will really lighten as they dry too, so even though my colours looked quite strong as I was painting them, they really lightened to pastel tones when they dried. You do need to use acrylic paints because we want those colours to be waterproof for the next step, and acrylics are waterproof when they are dry.

Paint all of the doilies, filling them all up with colour.

Once painted, leave them to completely dry.

Next, make a 1:1 ratio mix of water and PVA glue and stir well. Dip each doily in, saturate it with the glue solution then gently squeeze each doily out and lay flat on a sheet of plastic to dry (they won't stick to the plastic). You don’t want to squeeze them out too tightly that you are not left with much of the glue solution in the doilies, but you also don’t want blobs of glue in the little gaps either.

Now leave them to dry completely.

Once dry they can attached to a wall and will hold their shape. I think they look great in clusters. The more the merrier. I must get my hands on some more!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Jules :)