Mod Podge Fabric Dish

This is the kind of thing I hoped would happen when I resolved to stash bust! I had been shopping for a nice heavy little dish to sit on my craft desk and keep bits and pieces (beads, tiny screws, etc.) from wandering off. I hadn’t found anything perfect for a price I liked, but I knew something would come up.

Again, you’ll have to forgive some grainy photos. I haven’t found a lamp for the nook yet and these were taken at night. I’ll get this figured out someday…

I started with a little dipping bowl that fell and chipped, some scrap fabric from making Christmas aprons and Mod Podge that was already out from another project. This was all very spur of the moment.

Do you like my fancy palette? It’s left over from my daughter’s birthday, she loves monkeys.

I made sure to leave a wide berth of excess fabric because I wasn’t sure how far it needed to sink into the dish.

I needed a weight to keep the fabric in place for the next step. I went ahead and trimmed more excess here, but kept my scraps. They came in handy.

To help the fabric conform to the curves of my dish, I cut in about two or three inches in at every corner. If I was working with a more uniformly shaped dish I would just make equidistant cuts. The butterfly was a bit complex.

The dish got a thorough coat of Mod Podge. They do make Fabric Mod Podge for projects like this, but if the original formula was good enough for creator Jan Wetstone to cover a VW Beetle with bed sheets, I figure it can handle this.

Some of my cuts behaved nicely when the fabric was pressed into the dish, others less so. This is where I was glad I kept my scraps. I used similar colors of print to fill my gaps. No in-progress pictures here, though; I had to use my fingers to get into the smaller curves and couldn’t risk Mod Podging my camera!

The whole inside of the dish and about half an inch past the edges (to prevent fraying) got a good Podging.

After letting the Mod Podge dry overnight, I trimmed up the edges. They were still rougher than I hoped.

But a hot glue gun and some grosgrain ribbon fixed that problem straight away!

This little dish has a matching partner that may yet fall prey to my whims, because I’m totally in love with this one. If I do it again I’ll remember to put my fill-in scraps underneath the main fabric for a more finished look. Otherwise, I’m really happy with the way this little impromptu project turned out!