Christmas Craft: Placemats

Here’s a project that took so much longer to complete than I thought it would! I bought 8 round craftwood placemats and set about adhering these cute red and white Mozi paper napkins to them to make Christmas placemats.

First, seal both sides of the placemat with Gesso and leave it to dry, then spray paint one side with the white gloss. When all that is dry, carefully peel apart the napkin so that it is only one ply and use your gel medium (or Mod Podge) to coat the underside then stick down and smooth over the placemat. Then coat the top of the paper napkin as well for good adhesion. You need to be really careful not to overwet the paper with the glue (gel medium) as it is prone to ripping when wet. Don’t worry about the little creases in the paper napkin – they give the piece some character.

Leave it to dry and spray with a sealer. Once my sealer was dry, the placemats were looking great but they were still a little sticky and I wasn’t convinced they would stand up to much use. I came up with the idea of applying some Contact paper to seal it further and give it a nice protective layer. Contact is that clear self-adhesive plastic book covering stuff – I think it may be called Shelf Liner in the US. Trace around one of the placemats and cut out your 8 pieces then carefully smooth them on. Once the Contact was applied, I needed to do something about the edges, so I took some red bias binding and ran it through my Xyron to apply adhesive to it, then wrapped it around the edges.