Usually, I write about projects that I’d encourage anyone to try. Well, this one is different.

I started off with such confidence. There were numerous tutorials on Pinterest, promising the ease of transferring a colour photo to a piece of wood. It looked so rustic and cute! I had to try it. (Surely, my walls had room somewhere.)

I breezed into the craft store and asked a sales associate to point me in the direction of the gel medium.* I figured she would be curious why I wanted such an obscure item, and maybe ask about what I was planning.

“Oh, you’re transferring a photo to wood?” was the dull reply.

Apparently this project wasn’t quite as groundbreaking as I’d thought.

The project started off smoothly enough. I picked out a few different photos that were printed by an inkjet printer — onto regular paper, not photo paper. (Remember that the picture will appear on the wood as a mirror image, so flip it before printing it if you want to preserve the original look — or make any text legible.)

I brushed a thick layer of gel medium onto a piece of smooth MDF, and pressed the printed photos — facedown — onto the surface. I rubbed each photo to make sure there weren’t any air bubbles, and left them to dry for 12 hours. No problems.

The next day, I dipped a rag in water and squeezed it over the paper, soaking the entire surface.

Then I started the tedious process of rubbing off the wet paper, without actually rubbing the ink off the wood. This is when things started to fall apart … literally.

I would rub too hard or not use enough water, and chunks of the photo would disappear completely, ruining the entire piece. I would rub the paper off lightly until it looked good, and return an hour later to a foggy, paper-covered picture. I tried painting over the filmy pictures with Mod Podge, and then it just preserved the cloudiness.

I repeated the process again and again, with different photos, trying to find a method that worked. I kept putting off writing this column, because I wanted to wait until I’d figured it out. It couldn’t beat me!

I read different tutorials to try to figure out what was going wrong, and then I came across one that was different: “Keep wetting the paper and rubbing and allowing it to dry. For me, it took about eight times of this cycle before I was able to remove all the paper residue, so be patient!”

Eight times! No wonder I was struggling — I’d been trying to rub off all of the paper residue in a single attempt.

I started fresh again — I think it was my sixth or seventh attempt by this point —with a fresh photo. I soaked it with water and started rubbing away the residue very, very gently, swirling the pads of my fingers in a circle, and brushing the little white bits of paper off to the side.

I let it dry, and repeated the wetting/swirling/brushing exercise four more times — with the picture looking clearer each time, but still cloudy.

After the photo had dried for the fifth time, I brushed two coats of gel medium over the surface, and it removed the remaining cloudiness. It dried clear, and I could actually see the picture on the wood. There may have been a little happy dancing.

Since this attempt had been half-heartedly stuck to the corner of a large piece of MDF — I’d ruined a lot of wood by that point — I had Michael cut it out with his saw. And yes, I was super nervous that he would chop through it, after all of my hard work!

The finished product is nice, but was it worth the effort? No, not really. Not at all, actually. I’m glad I finally figured out how to do it properly, for my own crafty pride, but I still don’t understand why it’s such a popular project. Maybe it’s trendy for the same reasons everyone went crazy turning wooden crates into coffee tables?

I recommend this project if you are partial to rubbing off the pads of your fingertips. I recommend this project if you are very bored and also a bit sadistic. I recommend this project if you are looking for a crafty challenge that will leave you yelling at a piece of wood and cursing the manufacturers of gel medium.

If none of those things apply to you, skip the fancy gel medium transfer and just glue your photos directly to wood with a bit of Mod Podge instead. It’s much easier, and your fingertips will remain intact. Promise.