A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

My mother was a professional seamstress, so whenever we went shopping for clothes, she would take one look at the price tag on something and say, "No, I can make that." It drove me crazy, because I didn't want to have to pick out a pattern and cloth and buttons; I just wanted a shirt.

Well, it turns out the old adage about turning into your mother is true, because I took one look at the price on this globe art:

and thought, "I can make that."

(Spoiler alert: No, I couldn't. I made a less complex collage, and even though it was easier to make than I'm sure Wendy Gold's creations are, it was such a high degree of difficulty that I now know exactly why her prices range from $400-800 dollars. But if you want to follow me into crafting madness, here's a tutorial.)

I chose my canvas, one of the half-dozen vintage globes in my house:*

I picked this one because it has the best stand and it didn't match the rest of my globes (which are blue). Plus, I paid $2 for it at a garage sale, so if I screwed it up I wouldn't have ruined a valuable antique.**

Then I had to decide how to cover the globe. I lucked out and found a roll of wrapping paper with this pattern on sale at Paper Source:

Feathers will be easy to cut out, I thought. And they were! Until I had to cut out 600 of them:

I thought it would take maybe half a sheet of feathers to cover the globe. I knew I was in trouble when my first decoupage session took an hour, used all the feathers I'd cut so far, and yielded this:

In the end, I cut out every single feather on two 27" x 39" sheets of wrapping paper. My hand still cramps up just thinking about it. I used an Xacto knife and scissors—like I said, easy stuff.

Then there was the gluing, which was relatively easy since I was working in rows. I used matte Mod Podge and did a coat above and below each feather as I went, then a coat over the entire globe when it was finished.

To entertain myself while I worked, I imagined the feathers were a plague spreading over the earth and the last cities to be covered were the last bastions of human life. (I'm super fun at parties.)

Valdivia, Chile was the Feather Flu's final holdout.

Between cutting and gluing, the entire project took about 25 hours and most of my sanity. The finished product is pretty impressive, though:

*Fun fact: I was the National Geographic Geography Bee champion of my middle school. I also just like old junk.
**None of my globes are valuable. But they are well-loved.