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She’s Crafty! Ikea Fira Paper Craft

I’ve been overly negligent with this here blog. I have a good reason: I bought a condo.  Well, my boyfriend Baron and I bought one together.  We made the momentus move from North York to downtown which is a huge lifestyle change. In addition to the general crazyness of buying our first home – we had to do some somewhat minor renovations to make the place livable – but isn’t that the fun part?! Yes it is!

All this thinking about furniture and design and decorating has made me want to craft something bad… that combined with the fact that all my art/craft supplies have been packed away for over two months and I’ve got one big craft itch.

I’ve scratched it a bit today with my Ikea Fira Chest craft. I’ve seen this around on various design blogs: Ikea Hacker, Chez Larsson, Decor8… and they all looked great, so I decided to try it.

I use my fira chest to store makeup and jewlery and other skin care/toiletries. The inside of the drawer can get really messy from the makeup, so I’m trying to figure out how to best protect it.

I got some fancy scrapbook paper from the store Essence Du Papier, some spray adhesive and spray gloss from the art store and set to it.

The supplies

I’ve never really done a craft like this before, so I wasn’t 100% sure on what materials to use… I decided to paint the edge of the box white using acrylic paint

Fira gets painted White

White Paint

I traced the edges of the box on to the backs of the papers I selected and cut them out using the knife. I used spray adhesive on both the wood and the back of the paper and stuck them on. That seemed to work alright. I’ve experimented with the spray gloss – I wanted something to protect the surface from dirt and what not. So far it seems like the spray gloss just soaks through the paper – but does provide some what of a finish. Maybe Mod Podge would have been a better option! (I chose spray gloss because I thought it would provide a more even finish. hrm)

I also covered both sides of the small drawers in paper – different colours/patterns, as I couldn’t decide what I wanted it to look like. This is great because all I have to do to change it up is put the drawers in the other way

Anywho, here is the finished result:

Finished Fira Chest

Finished Fira

Or, finished so far. I am not sure if I should add paper to the entire insides of the box (the side walls, and back), and of course I’m still not sure exactly how to ‘finish’ it.. but this is what it looks like and I’m quite pleased with it.

Tags: chest, craft, crafts, fira, ikea, ikea fira, paper