DIY Decoupaged Wall Plates

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

You’ll have the prettiest, most mitchy-matchy wall plates with this easy upgrade!

The cheap plastic wall plates that cover every light switch and outlet in my house are also veeeerrrrrry old, which is obvious from their dingy off-white color.

Unless interior designers in the 1980s were super into everything looking like it smoked two packs a day?

Yes, new wall plates are cheap, and even cute wall plates are pretty cheap. But that’s part of the problem, because even if I donated my gross old wall plates and bought cute new ones, nobody is going to then buy *my* chainsmoker-chic outlet covers and light switch plates when they can also buy cute new ones for just a few cents more!

The good news is that I’m not dealing with any of that nonsense. Instead, I decoupaged my wall plates, and they now look awesome and, most importantly, like they’ve never touched a single cigarette in their entire lives!

Decoupaging a wall plate is one of the simplest DIY projects there is, and even simpler if you’ve ever done any kind of papercrafting. But even if you haven’t, this project is SO easy that it’s pretty much impossible to mess up.

Here’s how to decoupage yourself a new outlet cover or light switch plate!

Step 1: Source your materials–especially terrific paper!

For this project, you will need:

• wall plates, squeaky clean and dry. Oils from fingers can disrupt proper adhesion of the glue, so wash your wall plates with dish soap and water, then let dry. And don’t forget that safety always comes first! Cracked or undersized wall plates absolutely DO need to be replaced.
• paper. This is going to be the star of the show! ANY paper that can handle glue will work for this project. Scrapbook paper is fine, but so are old book or magazine pages, sheet music, or anything with a similar weight. For this particular project, I’m using vintage wallpaper samples from a sample book I thrifted once upon a time. I never really found a great use for the contents of the carpet sample book I thrifted at the same time, but I have used the snot out of that wallpaper sample book over the years!
• Mod Podge. Any PVA glue can be substituted, because you’ll be sealing the decoupaged plate separately, regardless.
• water-based polyurethane. I spray clean and disinfect my light switch covers, so I need a beefier sealant than Mod Podge. I love to keep a quart can of water-based polyurethane kicking around my supply closet at all times to serve all my sealant-based needs!
• scissors, craft knife, and awl. You can use a sharpened pencil instead of the awl, but you can’t get by without the scissors and the craft knife.

Step 2: Glue the front of the plate to the back of the paper.

It will feel upside down, but I think the paper adheres more evenly if I lay it face down on the table, coat the front of the wall plate with glue, and rest it face down on top of the paper.

Press evenly on the back of the plate to make sure that the entire front is adhered, then flip it over and use your fingers to smooth out any bubbles by coaxing them off the edge of the plate.

Finish by trimming the extra paper away from the plate, making sure that you leave enough around the edges to cover the sides of the plate.

If you’re doing proper decoupage by adding additional layers of paper or cut-outs or other embellishments, you can wait and do it as the last step before sealing the finished plate.

Step 3: Cover the sides of the plate.

When you trimmed extra paper away in the previous step, you left enough to cover the sides of the plate. One side at a time, coat the back of the paper with glue, then use your fingers to press it down and mold it to the narrow side of the plate. Don’t tuck it under the back–you can trim any extra again after the glue dries.

Each additional side you work on will require you to fold the edge of the preceding side’s paper under, just like you’re wrapping a present. When you get to the last side, you’ll need to fold both edges under, so add extra glue as necessary.

Step 4: Cut open the holes for the light switches or outlets.

You’re also going to cover the interior sides of these openings with paper, but it will be easy!

Face the plate down on top of a self-healing cutting mat, then use the craft knife to cut through the paper covering each opening as if you’re cutting pie. If your opening is rectangular, you can get away with four slices of pie, but if your opening is circular, you’ll want to cut it into more slices.

Coat the back of the paper with glue, then use your fingers to fold each paper pie slice neatly over the side and to the back of the plate.

Trim as needed to avoid covering any screw holes.

And speaking of those screw holes…

Step 5: Open up the screw holes.

From the back side of the plate, use the sharp tip of the awl or a sharpened pencil to make a tiny pinprick or dent in the paper covering each screw hole, then from the front use the same tool to poke a proper hole. No glue needed!

Step 6: Seal the wall plate.

Follow the directions on your glue package for the drying and curing time of the glue, then follow it up with two or more coats of your favorite water-based polyurethane sealant, also following the directions on the package for dry time and cure time. My polyurethane, for instance, required additional coats separated by at least two hours from the previous coat, and a cure time of a full week before subjecting the wall plate to full use.

My light switches themselves are clearly still gross (any tips for getting old paint spills off of a light switch?), but the light switch plates are beautiful!

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In Which I Am Completely Normal About This AU Captain America Fanfic Turned Gay Hockey Smut Book Series

Game Changer by Rachel Reid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Did I like the romance plot?

No.

Did I enjoy the sex scenes?

Also no.

Am I nevertheless rating this 5 stars?

Absolutely yes!

Finally, I have found a hockey book series in which the protagonists actually play hockey!

Scott and Kip have your stereotypically cringey insta-love meet-cute, and their relationship progresses equally unrealistically--I think Scott beat out all the lesbians with how soon he brought out the metaphorical U-Haul. I also LOATHE the voices that this audiobook’s narrator chose for each guy; he literally should have switched them? Or just chosen ANYTHING besides cartoon “Brooklyn” meat-head who can’t pronounce r’s or t’s. I had to have a genuine serious talk with myself by the end of chapter 2 to see if I could even make it through this audiobook as-is. I only managed by pretending that these were real people, because obviously you can’t hate someone’s actual real voice. Or, you know, you can, but only silently inside your own head and outside your head you just have to deal with it. Also, Kip clearly has a very big speech impediment and it would be very wrong to hate him for it.

@hillarynorwood #heatedrivalry #gamechanger #kipandscott ♬ original sound - BGuy

I also hated that even though our rich and famous the man, the myth, the legend Scott Hunter insta-fell in love with a poor, it’s clear that Kip is a virtuous poor--and therefore deserving of love from a rich-and-famous--because he’s too proud to let Scott pay for things. Like, bro, we get it. You’re not a whore, and your love can’t be bought. But also, you work in a smoothie shop? And your boyfriend is a millionaire? Just let him pay off your student loans, which are a predatory scam designed to keep you poor, anyway!

Other than Kip’s moaning about not wanting to take Scott’s money, Kip has such a bad time for the majority of this book that I felt terrible for him. Scott Hunter was an asshole for almost this entire book. He took that beautiful social butterfly of a man and turned him into his dirty little secret, isolating him up inside his empty penthouse, making him feel uncomfortable talking to his own parents, much less all his friends, because he felt he had to maintain his boyfriend’s closet, and generally making him more miserable for the majority of the book than when he was still living at home with his parents and working a dead-end low-wage job. That scene in which his best friend, the only person Scott has allowed him to tell about their relationship, says she’s moving across the country, and when Kip tries to tell Scott about it he couldn’t be less interested or more irritated, got me in the gut. Poor Kip! What Scott should have done was leave that beautiful man alone, get a bunch of therapy from a licensed professional, come out properly, and then ask Kip out when he could finally deserve him. But some guys just have all the luck, and I guess it turned out fine in the end.

My first favorite thing about this book is how Scott actually plays hockey in it, and we get some mid-game drama, a couple of fights, gossip about players on other teams, trade deadline stress, dealing with the rookies, etc., but my second favorite thing about this book is, as in Heated Rivalry (which I read out of order), the real Big Bad is 1) toxic masculinity, closely followed by 2) the NHL as a whole (see: toxic masculinity). And I do think that Reid’s version of how the first openly gay player in the NHL comes out is just about the only realistic scenario. She starts with a remarkably empathetic and close-knit team, as evidenced by the removal of the team’s big jerk early on, and she makes the closeted gay player the team’s long-time and very beloved captain. He also has to be one of the best players in the league, and closer to retirement than not so he’s got a legacy of greatness and a terrific reputation. And although Hunter planned to come out at the end of the season regardless, it’s very important that it happens right after winning the Stanley Cup, just so nobody can pretend like Hunter’s sexuality affects his game or the team’s success. If any real NHL player actually wants to come out--and I really, really hope some NHL players will!--circumstances close to that would also be their best-case scenario.

I like Heated Rivalry so much better than this book that I’m wondering if it’s the fact that this is a reskinned Captain America fanfic that’s throwing it off. (Yes, it is. YES, IT IS!). Like, you can have some amazing writing in fanfic (see: All the Young Dudes), but it’s very, very different in most cases from a “proper” book, and every book I’ve read knowing that it’s a reskinned fanfic I think has suffered from it. In this specific case, there's some backstory that it's easy to gloss over in a Captain America fic, because we already know that Steve's mother died when he was young, for instance, so you don't really need to build all the ways that affects him into his character yourself, because your readers already know it's there. But when you reskin the brief paragraph in which Steve Rogers mentions his mother's death into one in which Scott Hunter does, you've got the same backstory beat, but you DON'T automatically get the same understanding of all the ways that affects him, because Scott Hunter's backstory isn't part of the cultural canon the way Steve Roger's is. I think Reid could have done a lot more to make Scott Hunter a more sympathetic and realistic character by showing how his isolation and lack of family has led to some of his problematics behaviors towards Kip, especially, but I wonder if he was always Steve Rogers in her head, and so she didn't notice that she needed to. In contrast, I think she handled Ilya's emotionally complicated backstory in Heated Rivalry very adeptly, and I can even see some places where I think she's foreshadowing some more things for Ilya and Shane in her later books, so she's very capable of writing a full character when she's not having to wade through a whole other IP to get there.

Maybe the lesson is to keep the concept, keep the plot, but otherwise just pretend like you’re writing a brand-new story and start it from scratch.

Other than the characters of Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov, that is. Those two should obviously be characters in EVERY book.

P.S. View all my reviews

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I Have a New Personality, and It Is This Giant Bow I Sewed for Valentine's Day

It is soooooooo cute, right?!?

I'm genuinely obsessed with it.

I'm at least two months behind on the giant bow trend, and honestly probably more like six months, but it was the entirety of December during which everyone was showing off their giant Christmas bows on Tiktok that finally influenced me to covet a giant bow of my own.

I figured I could probably reverse engineer my own giant bow pattern by looking at all the million examples on social media, but then I was all, "Don't be a bad citizen, Self!", and purchased the pattern on etsy...

...and then proceeded to ignore all the pattern creator's helpful instructions for actually making the pattern and messed up a bunch of parts and cut the ribbon notches after the fact so I had to satin stitch the raw edges and forgot most of the edge stitching and tried to sub in stash fleece instead of batting but had to iron on interfacing anyway because fleece wasn't stiff enough, etc.

I did remember the quilting, at least!

I had so much trouble thanks to my own cussedness that I was worried I was going to hate the finished bow, but omg I am OBSESSED with it. I'm already mentally digging through my fabric stash to see what bow I'm going to replace this one with after Valentine's Day, and I've got a couple of ideas for custom fabric prints that I want my husband/in-house graphic designer to create for me that would make printed panels just the right size for these bows.

Spoiler alert: would a giant crime scene tape bow not be SO COOL?!?

Here's what else I'm currently working on that's not turning out quite right:

I'm disappointed with the yellow that I picked for my latest cross-stitched bookmark--it's too light! You can barely see it against the white! How do you figure out if your floss is going to have enough contrast with your fabric? Is this when you're supposed to switch your photo to black and white and compare the tones?

Hold on...

Huh! It kind of works, because both of the yellows barely show up, but the green seems super light, too, and I don't have a problem with the green actually, so I dunno.

Ah, well! Spam me with your floss-choosing strategies in the Comments!

As soon as I resign myself to my too-pale yellow pony and finish that cross-stitch bookmark, I think I want to start on my first BIG cross-stitch project.

Check out this cross-stitch pattern I found on the Antique Pattern Library website!

I'm completely in love with Sir Kittycat, and I can't wait to stitch him. Do you think I should stitch the white parts or the red parts?

I need to learn how to cross-stitch super fast, too, because the Antique Pattern Library also has horoscope figures, Aesop's fables, my boy Achilles, and Joan of Arc literally being burned at the stake, the latter of which is, of course, desperately sad but I want to make it anyway. Even though we're not religious, I've always considered Joan of Arc my older kid's patron saint, and I think it would make a morbid, but interesting, gift for her.

So, a giant crime scene tape bow for one kid and a cross-stitch of a woman being burned at the stake for another. I've already got so many ideas for Christmas!

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I Can Mend a Hole in a Back Pocket Three Different Ways. This is My First Favorite!

Just as I promised, here’s my other favorite way to mend a hole in a back pocket!

I’ve got two favorite ways to mend a hole in a back pocket (and a third way that I don’t like as much but that also works great!), and recently, my kid presented me with a pair of pants that had a hole in each back pocket, allowing me to put my two favorite methods into direct competition. She keeps her phone in one back pocket and her wallet in the other, so as a bonus, the holes are nearly symmetrical and nearly identical. It’s the perfect scenario for an experiment!

With the kid’s permission, I mended one hole with a patch on the outside, and one hole with a patch on the inside. Both methods require the same materials and take approximately the same amount of time. They’re also both very easy, with the trickiest part of the outside patch the folding and creasing, and the trickiest part of the inside patch its placement. I showed you how to do the outside patch last week, so this time, let’s discuss the inside patch!

This inside patch method involves just what it says: instead of patching the outside of the hole, you’ll be patching the inside of the hole. The patch will still show through the hole, but will be far less visible than a patch outside the hole would be. What WILL be pretty visible–depending on thread color!–is all the reinforcement stitching that stabilizes the hole and keeps the patch attached. Depending on your goals and your skill set, the stitching can be messy (but effective!) or highly decorative.

Here’s what you need to complete this mend:

Materials

• patch. Match the weight of the existing fabric, but otherwise the choice is up to you! If you match the patch fabric very well, the patch will be quite inconspicuous, but a visible patch can be really cute, too.
• thread. This is the most visible part of this mend, so your choice is very important here. Well-matched thread color will be nearly invisible, but you also can do such cute things with visible mending.
• cutting and sewing supplies. This is a hand-sewing project, so requires a hand-sewing needle and thread scissors. Pins are helpful, but optional. You don’t particularly need an iron, and you definitely don’t need fusible interfacing, although you can use it it–just keep it away from the hole itself!

Step 1: Prep and place the patch.

Cut the patch to be wider than the hole in both length and width, then insert it into the back pocket and place it behind the patch. This is the trickiest part of the whole project, since you have to make sure that the patch sufficiently overlaps the hole, and you have to do it mostly by feel.

Once the patch is in place, you can pin it to make sure it stays secure, but it should stay very well even without pinning. If you do pin, make sure that you haven’t caught the inside of the pants with your pin–the last thing you want to do is sew your pocket shut!

Step 2: Hand-stitch the patch in place.

This is the fun–and a little bit time-consuming!– part!

Thread your needle with the thread you’ve chosen, and then simply begin to stitch the patch to the pocket. Focus on stabilizing the hole, particularly the raw edges of the hole, but stitch over the entire patch area, the more stitches, the better. Every stitch that you put in, however messily, strengthens the fabric and reinforces the mend.

When you’re finished hand-sewing, turn the pocket inside-out and trim away any excess patch material, being careful not to cut through any of your stitching.

I asked my kid for her final opinion (since these are her pants, lol!), and she said that she liked the look of the inside patch better, but thought that the outside patch was fine, too. I will say that the inside patch seems less visible from a distance, but these grey jeans were tricky to match, and if I’d been able to match the outside patch fabric perfectly to the pants it might well be just as inconspicuous.

For what it’s worth, I volunteer monthly with my local public library to mend items that patrons bring in, and I use the inside patch method almost exclusively during Mending Days. It’s especially easy when someone needs a mend in the knee or thigh, since I can use the zigzag stitch on my sewing machine to do alllll that stitching in just a few seconds. If it’s a rip that I’m mending, not a hole, often the patch isn’t visible at all afterwards, and if I happen to have a thread color that perfectly matches the fabric, the stitching is barely visible, as well.

Which method do YOU prefer?

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I Am My Younger Child's Bespoke Seamstress, and Other Adventures in Parenting College Students

To be fair, serving as my kid's bespoke seamstress is high-key my favorite thing EVER. All I apparently really want with my life is for people to want me to sew things for them.

And the little kid, at least, is happy to oblige!

First, some mending:

I don't know if it's secret sensory issues or just the fact that I raised picky parsnips, but both kids have the absolute worst time trying to find clothes they like. I lecture often on how many pants and shirts, etc., ought to make up a minimum wardrobe, and yet both kids regularly go off to college with half that and then bitch that all their clothes are constantly falling apart.

Like, YEAH, if you're wearing and therefore washing a garment all the time, it's obviously going to wear out more quickly! THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU TO BRING MORE CLOTHES TO SCHOOL!

And don't even get me started about coats. One kid insists that she has not and will not ever find a coat she likes, and pretty much just layers infinite hoodies. In a Philadelphia winter, no less. I've told her that at some point her professors are going to decide that she must be too impoverished to buy herself a coat and take up a collection, and she'll wake up one morning to find that they've put a gift bag with a brand-new coat in it outside her dorm room door. It won't be to her taste, but she'll nevertheless have to wear it until graduation lest she seem ungrateful.

The other kid does have a single coat that she approves of enough to wear--not that it's warm enough for her own Ohio winters, but whatever--but over Winter Break one day I got too close to the kid while she was wearing it, and I was all, "...do you ever wash this thing?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"How?"

"Cold and Delicate, like the label says."

I said, "Yeah... no," and then wrestled it off her. Girl was wearing this thing not only to class every day, but also to the horse barn twice a week and the Humane Society once a week, not to mention on environmental science field trips and throughout all the other horrors of college life. And then she was barely washing it, because the label said she had to treat it fancy!

Like, it's a COAT, Bro. And not even a puffer coat. It can take a little bit of temperature. I soaked it for a day in hot water with a half-cup of Biz stirred in, closed inside my cooler to keep the water hot. I will not describe to you the state of the water when I finally drained it, but it was something. Afterwards, I stuffed it inside a mesh laundry bag and washed it on Warm and Regular with two rinses with my regular laundry detergent, more Biz, a half-cup of ammonia, and a fistful of citric acid in the rinse compartment because I have the hardest water on the planet. 

Let me tell you that this coat was squeaky clean when it got done. Not a whiff of horse or dog or polluted creek to be found! The faux fur was a little stiff after air drying, but after I went over it with a lint rake it was also soft and fluffy again. 

This is your sign to become as obsessed with the r/laundry subreddit as I am.

Along with the mending and the laundry, I actualized the little kid's dream of stitching just the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt inside the sleeves of a short-sleeved T-shirt, so that the kid could get the layered T-shirt look without having to wear layered T-shirts on her body:

*cough, cough* sensory issues *cough*

I thought the stitch lines ended up a little too visible to fool anyone, but the kid said she liked it, so whatever.

My biggest sewing project, though, was for a kid who I don't even know yet!

In the younger kid's first care package of the school year, I sent her and her roommates a set of hoodies that I'd appliqued with their school name in their class colors. I'm VERY chuffed that all the kids seem to love them, and even more chuffed that when I offered to make a similar hoodie for the younger kid's Hell Child (it's a school thing, don't worry about it) in that kid's class colors, the younger kid was super enthusiastic about it.

So I thrifted a hoodie, double-checked the one I'd made for the kid so I could remember how on earth I'd made it--

I've asked the kid several times if the loose threads are an issue, because I'd worried they wouldn't like it, but she says that all the hoodie recipients are super into that look. So yay!

--and then made a red version for the kid's baby red!

I used Heat n' Bond instead of Pellon for this project (I miss you, Joann's!), and although I'm worried it won't wear as well as the Pellon, omg it was SO much easier to apply.

Honestly, I think it turned out even cuter than the blue version, thanks to the matching hoodie color:

And now the kids are back at school for the Spring semester, and I have nobody to sew for but boring old me, sigh. I did impulse buy this giant bow pattern so I can make a giant Valentine's bow that I do not need but will nevertheless decorate my front door with, so that will keep me entertained for a few evenings, I guess.

Spam me with all your ideas for where I can put giant bows!

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I Have Discovered Gay Hockey Smut

Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I apparently started reading in the wrong order, because I was actually supposed to read Game Changer first, but whatever.

I’m actually more mad that I’ve been loudly cheering for hockey and reading smut for YEARS, and nobody has loved me enough to tell me that this entire book series of genuine hockey smut--bonus points: GAY hockey smut!--even exists! I had to rely on TIKTOK to clue me in, so I guess my parasocial relationship with TikTok has officially reached the next level. Thank you, TikTok, for knowing what I like before I know it myself! I checked this out of the library as an audiobook, and spent much of December plopping myself down with a big armful of cross-stitching next to my husband as soon as he fired up his Playstation and turning this on "so we could listen together." At first he was mortified, but it didn't take long before he was as in the weeds as I was with Shane and Ilya, and now I'm very much looking forward to watching the TV series together. Breaking down those gender essentialist stereotypes one tropey romance at a time!

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My two favorite things about Heated Rivalry are that 1) it has a genuine plot, and isn’t just a bunch of sex scenes pasted together with mildly plotty paragraphs in between them, and 2) there is actual hockey contained within. Not, like, a ton of actual hockey, because even I understand that, given the extended timeframe of the book, full play-by-plays of every game our heroes played during that time would be too much (but if someone wanted to make some fan videos attempting it, I’d watch them!), but enough to flesh the characters out as actual hockey players, and enough to make the game of hockey an actual part of the book. Because my personal belief is that, if you’re reading a hockey romance, you want to read romance and YOU WANT TO READ HOCKEY, and I will never understand how a self-proclaimed hockey romance (*cough, cough* Icebreaker *cough*) can manage to have absolute zero hockey therein.

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Since I am now apparently one of the Old Ones, and have been known to regale my fourth-wave daughters with stories about the bad old days when everyone was in the closet and being queer felt so fraught, one of the things that interests me the most about Heated Rivalry is how, by choosing a setting of male professional sports, the book is able to harken back to those bad old days and the experience of feeling actively in danger simply because of one’s sexual identity. Like, yes, I know homophobia is still out there (though not really in the circles in which my own kids run, hence why I feel the need to regularly trauma dump some lived experience truth bombs on them), but only in male professional sports does it really feel Brokeback Mountain-level these days. So setting the book series in the world of the NHL is a great way to access those Brokeback Mountain-levels of angst again, albeit with, at least in Heated Rivalry, a happy-ish ending.

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And of course, since I’ve also been bitching about this issue for years, finding out that in Heated Rivalry the REAL Big Bad is the NHL itself is right up my alley. Bring back Pride jerseys, you buncha assholes! I swear the administration’s bullshit toxic masculinity is so out of touch with their fan base that it’s ridiculous. Like, they genuinely thought that their fans would overlook the fact that the Golden Knights’ entirely mid goalie is a rapist?!? Just the fact that there are no out NHL players should make the administration realize that something about its playing environment is very, very wrong and they ought to treat that like the mental health crisis that it surely is. But nope! We’ve apparently just got to be hockey fans as best we can while they actively act like they’re playing in 1950, not 2025.

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I did think that the book was making too big a meal out of the “rivalry” part of Heated Rivalry. Yes, you can easily convince me that the gay part is an issue, because hey, toxically masculine NHL, but the rivalry? Um, lots of players have good friends from different teams? How could they not, when players get traded so often? And when there are regular goodwill events like All-Star Weekend and the Olympics? I just didn’t buy it as an issue, and every time a character tried to act like it was an issue it fell flat for me. Shane and Ilya had all the reasons in the world to be best buddies right from the start, AND it would have made their years-long situationship soooo much easier. Like, why wouldn’t they be friends, as top young players and top draftees and with so much in common? If they couldn’t figure out how to make it happen before, then the All-Star Weekend during which they were finally on the same team should have been the time! They publicly realize that they actually get along great! They make no secret of exchanging numbers! Whenever they play each other ever afterwards, they make a point of chatting during warm-ups, during which the announcers will fall all over themselves to say, “That’s what sportsmanship is all about, y’all.” They could even do the cute thing where their teams start fighting and one of them skates over, grabs the other by the scruff of their jersey, and skates them away from the scrum. The fans LOVE that stuff! And then after the game, their teammates are all, “Hey, you coming out with us?”, and each of them replies, “Nah, I’m hanging with Shane/Ilya tonight,” and that’s that.

Anyway, now onto Game Changer!

P.S. View all my reviews.

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