Etsy

I mean, serving tray. Tray. This post is about a tray. It all started with this tray I found for $8 at Ikea.

Then I was browsing Etsy and found this dreams-really-do-come-true fabric. $10 a yard. I was in love. Sometimes things just come together better than you can even imagine.  It would make a beautiful tray bottom.  I wasn’t digging the bottom at all.

I began disassembling the tray. Thanks Ikea for making it easy!

I’m not really one for measuring so I just laid the fabric down and cut around the now free bottom.

I gave the fabric a good ironing to get out all the folds.  I knew I would not be able to tolerate them showing up once I’d completed the project.

I then covered the entire white bottom the tray with Mod Podge and placed the fabric down over that.

I plastered the entire piece of fabric with Mod Podge and – this is really important – smoothed the fabric out in all directions.  The Mod Podge should dry and help any ridges to shrink down a little, but I did my best to preemptively handle that issue.

Once it had dried completely, I trimmed the edges off.

After sliding the bottom piece back in a few of the edges escaped the groove they are meant to rest under. I took my exacto knife and just trimmed them off.

At this point you can stop, sit back and enjoy a really cute tray. I did not, and I wish I had. I tried using this stuff.

Using Acrylic Water is still something I want to do on a future tray, but maybe not one that is made up of many pieces. The acrylic water leaked out of the cracks something fierce. I suppose you could try to seal up the cracks with caulk or use wood glue when you reassemble, but that all seems like an awful lot of work for a tray that you are probably trying to make on a budget. I have considered Mod Podging all the cracks and edges and then using the acrylic water, but I’m a little afraid to pull the trigger on that.