Mod Podge

Mod Podge is forty years old, unchanged from its original packaging. I love the logo, mod as anything you can find on a shelf in 2008, and the colors of the label are bright enough to jump off the shelf by themselves.

When I was in elementary school, one year our Christmas project was to make a box for our mothers, decoupaging a picture onto a small plywood rectangle we'd already painted. We used Mod Podge, and we used lots of it. It would have been a very new product at the time, so we were among the earliest users.

My mother still has the box. Much like a lot of what my parents owned, it's out on display in the tv room. The Mod Podge is intact, forty years later like a cockroach's shell. They kept cigarettes in the box for years, though its two compartments were probably supposed to be for decks of cards. Now there's a collection of seashells my mother picked up at the beach. I'll spare you a picture of it, but take my word for it, the durability of the hardened Mod Podge coating is its chief artistic quality. You could hurl it at a brick wall with a pitcher's speed and the box would break, but the coating would hold the broken parts together.

Upon going to the Mod Podge home page, I see that there are lots of different variations on the original 'glue, sealer and finish all in one' including a puzzle sealer. There are crafters worldwide who've undoubtedly known of the range of Plaid Products this whole time. I'm stunned by the vastness of the Mod Podge experience in the 21st century. I guess I'd thought it had slipped off the shelves years ago, maybe not made the millenium.

Maybe I'd just stopped going to those shelves.