Sunday, June 9, 2013

Slap a Star on the Wall

One of the things I worked on over my little "staycation"  is a starburst mirror as inspired by Ashley from 7th House on the Left. Let's start with the end result of my copycat mirror: 



Ashley's tutorial was fabulous and I was easily able to pick up the steps. I pretty much followed her steps verbatim so check out her blog to see how to Gorilla-glue this sucker together. The only deviation I did was I spray-painted this puppy gold instead of staining.

Here are some progress shots. 





Now, something I did not anticipate was the amount of supplies needed for this project. It needs so. much. glue.  I ran out of glue. Which required waiting overnight before I could go back to the store and buy more Gorilla Glue. Then, I ran out of tape. I had two small rolls of duct tape and about 1/4 roll left of the green Frog tape.  I used them all up in taping the individual sunburst shapes.  When I started gluing the smaller sunburst shapes together into larger rays... then I had to go buy more tape.

Then, I started spray-painting the wood with Rustoleum's Metallic Gold. Even with the primer + paint formula, this puppy sucked up the paint like crazy. So then I had to go buy more spray paint.  By the time this "little" project was done, I swear I must have made five trips to the stores to restock supplies. So learn from me. Always purchase more than you think you'll need. Once I was done spray-painting, I wasn't sure if I was really done.


The color isn't consistently gold--you can still see some of the wood texture through the paint, and some spots are shinier than others, due to the different textures in the shims. I didn't want to go solid gold, but I wasn't sure if the uneven, distressed finish was where I wanted it to be at. I had my mom give it a look and at first she wasn't sold either. Then she kind of said she liked the finish--it looked "weathered" and she thought it was good. Since I didn't want to go buy more spray paint, I let it go.

Then I glued the mirror on and this is the part I wish I'd spent a little more time being careful with. The "rays" of my mirror are all different lengths (ok, so I didn't do it exactly like Ashley did.... I got lazy). So when my dad and I "centered" the mirror, it wasn't perfectly centered in both directions. But in any case, I glued the mirror down and let it dry.  Ta-dah!



After we drilled the hardware in, we hung it up on the wall and here she lies.




Oh, yes. The table is another quickie project of mine. It went from this:



To this:




(Ignore the mess--there are a few other ongoing projects at this point in time that is contributing to random dumping grounds of miscellaneous items.)

So there you have it. One project of twenty-- starburst mirror:  finished. 

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