If you expect this senior citizen who took up decoupage about three years ago to be humble about her craft, then you’ve got the wrong woman.

Standing in her Newton dining room and looking over a table covered with her work — beautifully adorned picture frames, vases, earrings and even a pocketbook — Rita Wolfson says, “I have to tell you, I love everything I do. It’s all gorgeous.”

Her eyes sparkle as she says it. She knows it’s funny, but she’s also dead serious.

You may be familiar with the technique. Wolfson finds eye-catching, colorful pages printed on elegant stock (Museum of Fine Art publications are one of her favorite sources), and she cuts them into little, often angular pieces. Then she glues them into a mosaic onto an existing piece — a picture frame or an old jewelry box, for example. Then they’re shellacked and lacquered.

As you may know, it’s called decoupage. But just don’t call it that around this artist. The term irks Wolfson, who sees herself as more of a trailblazer.

“I thought this was my invention,” she says. “I never took a class. I suppose, technically, if you look it up in the dictionary, it’s a form of decoupage. But I don’t know — I just do what I do.”

She probably is a trendsetter when it comes to recycling “GoodLife” magazine. She’s the only one that we know of who took page 42 of the summer issue and turned it into art. Interestingly, that page was the story of how Sara Stevens Oot took a family heirloom — an old quilt that was literally falling apart at the seams — and rescued it by turning it into pillows. So a story about recycling became, well, recycled.

“I just loved the colors [of the pillows in the photos] when I saw them,” she says. And soon the page had become a lovely vase.

Right from the start, Wolfson has seen her avocation as a way to support her favorite charities. Over the past two and half years, she’s raised about $5,000 for groups such as the Lupus Foundation and REACH: Beyond Domestic Violence. Once she’s covered her expenses, all the profits go to charity. To find out how to purchase her work, contact her at wolfsonnewt@aol.com, or, if you see her on the street, stop her. She’s been known to sell pins right off her jacket.

But charities aren’t the only ones who have benefited from Wolfson’s creative impulses. So has she. In May, Wolfson was heading out for a relative’s bat mitzvah, when she realized she needed something to dress up her black jacket.

 “So I made myself a pin,” she says. And then she confesses, “We were a little bit late.”

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