Copic Marker Shelf

So I’ve fallen victim to the sweet allure of Copic markers. I found some on sale quite a while back and since then I’ve been hooked. I’ve been gradually collecting them whenever I can find a good deal, and now I have enough that I actually needed a place to keep them. Up until now, I’ve been kind of just throwing them in a little bin I have by my drafting table.

Yes, my markers are in a plastic bag. I’m classy like that.

This setup was not working. It’s not really working for anything in those bins actually, but that’s for another day.

I don’t know if you guys have been shelf shopping lately, but in a word, it’s ridiculous. They are way too expensive for what you’re actually getting. They don’t even throw in a complementary marker to make you feel better. So I opted to make my own.

The idea was to just use things I had lying around and basically get make a shelf for free. A little scrap book board (chip board) glue and lots of lacquer later, I had this little number.

Not too shabby. If I were to do it again, I wouldn’t have taken the initial shortcut of not covering the board with paper before I glued it together. I figured I would just paint the entire thing once I was done assembling it, but that looks sloppy and I should have known I wouldn’t be happy with an ugly shelf. In the end I filled in the edges of the uncovered shelf with Glossy Accents and mixed up some gold paint for it.

Still lumpy, but better than before.

Also, no more stamping my own paper.  I didn’t want to buy new supplies for this project and I liked how thin this rice paper was. I thought it would be fun and easy to kind of decoupage it on. It was fun, but about as easy as using pre-printed scrapbook paper, and I could have saved the rice paper for something else.

For those of you who are interested in decoupage and want to use stamps, use archival ink. I used some distress inks on here and also used an acrylic gloss medium. The distress inks will bleed, which was fine for this project, but may not work for other projects.  They seemed to react a little bit with the lacquer too.  Maybe different paper and Modge Podge would work better?

All in all I’m really happy with it. And if I ever need another one, it will be a snap to put together. 🙂

So do yourself a favor and make your next little shelf. You can customize it to look exactly the way you want, and you can do it with little to no money.