A 'Napkin Decoupaged' mini table.

The last largish thing I planned to build for the mini shed was a table.  Having already made a smaller mosaic table, I needed a larger table to go with the bench.  Somewhere where mini people could work 😊

I am a bit more confident with my woodworking skills now so I thought this would be a piece of cake.

I cut up some dowel for legs and found a square bit of wood in the scrap box – perfect!  The scale worked well with my mini bench.

Having learnt from working on previous parts of the mini shed, it is beneficial to drill a small hole first for your screw to grip onto. So I drilled into the top of the leg and through the table top.

But, then I thought about how the screw would be sticking out of the top of the table. How could I sink it?   It’s called ‘countersinking’ I have since found out with the aid of Google.  So with a larger drill bit I drilled a slightly larger hole, just a couple of millimetres down, so that the screw head would be below the top of the table.

Then I screwed the legs onto the table.  Not hugely straight mind you, but at least there was no wobble.

Now I had to deal with the holes on the top of the table so I could have a nice smooth surface.  I didn’t have any wood filler so I used a blob of wood glue. It worked quite well luckily.

The next step was to smarten it up a bit. I decided to do some Napkin Decoupage on the top, but first I would need a coat of paint.  I used a basic white acrylic to give it an undercoat.

Then I painted the underside of the table and the legs in a couple of coats of metallic brown acrylic, to match the mini bench I had just finished.

Once that was all dry I could add the napkin to the table top.

Napkin Decoupage is a lovely craft, and you can put your napkin onto all sorts of things like glass bottles and slate coasters.  First of all you have to separate the napkin plys – these are the layers of paper within the napkin. There are usually three, occasionally four.  You need only to use one single ply with the pattern on.

Having separated the plys, I then coated the table top with Mod Podge – this is a glue brand with a good formula that works really well with napkin decoupage, but PVA glue can work just as well.

Once coated I then laid the singly ply napkin down on the top and with a piece of cling film wrapped around my finger I smoothed out all of the wrinkles.   Stupidly I pressed too hard at this stage (you do have to be quite gentle) and took some of the napkin back off, so I had to strip it back off.  I was very annoyed with myself for being so careless.  The now took me back a couple of steps as I then had to repaint the table top!

The second attempt went much better as I was extra careful with my smoothing out.  Once the napkin was in place I gave it another coat of Mod Podge and left it to try before trimming the excess napkin away.

And that is my little table finished.  The top is very scuff proof thanks to the Mod Podge top coat and I think it looks rather good(even if it does have a wonky leg!!)

This mini table took me around two hours to make in total, not including drying time.  so my whole mini shed project is now up to 44 hours in total.

If you would like to have a go at Napkin Decoupage, then have a look at my YouTube Tutorial on how to do a flat slate HERE or a bottle HERE.