Painted and Mod Podged Work Tray - Pt 1

I keep not wanting to work in my craft room on projects and opt instead to work in the living room, on the coffee table, so that I can watch tv, eat and spend time with my bf. This unfortunately sometimes results in my projects perhaps spending much more time than they should out and making a mess.

My solution? I'm going to get one of those trays with handles that I can just put my things in and pick up easy enough to take to my room to put away! Except I don't like spending $20-$30 on one when it might possibly get mussed up by my projects on occasion.... Solution!

I went to my local Hobby Lobby and got one of these bad boys for $3.49!! What a bargain!!

I went ahead and painted the whole thing using a mixture of a brick red, pumpkin orange and gold squirted on the wood, and mixed as I was painting with my sponge brush:

I already had some scrapbooking paper on hand (which is actually why I chose the colors I did, otherwise, it would have been blue ;) ) and used about 3 layers of mod podge on the paper, and 2 on the rest of the tray. 

You like the paper?? The sides of the tray aren't too rough with the multiple layers of mod podge as i lightly sanded in between layers.

The one thing I did very poorly though was to not actually measure the dimensions of the tray and paper; I free-handed the fitting and cutting process and the result?
 

Yeah, there was a gap... :( The best I could do at the time was put another piece of paper underneath the main one to sort of hide, but I'm not too happy with the way this looks so I will be trying to come up with a way to hide that before finishing this tray... I will be mixing a 3rd medium into this baby!! Check back later!!

Craft ya laters!!