Mirror Revamp

Hi

I am back again.Shocking,isn't it? Two days in a row!Well,there is a reason behind it.Yes,everything has an explanation and the expalanation is that I had taken off from work so I had spare time to work on some things.Going back to work tomorrow :-( so back to my normal,infrequent posting.

Anyway,today we are going to revamp a mirror.I am living in a rented flat right now and there are some awful plastic framed mirrors in each of the bathrooms.I am going to  move into my own apartment really really soon,so I did not want to bother with buying new ones.But why live with ugliness when you can beautify for cheap.Long story ahead,prepare yourself.


So for this project I took one of the mirrors from our guest bathroom.It had a plastic frame made to look like pine wood apparently.Me no likey.Things had to change .

First step.Sand the whole thing with a fine sandpaper.Wipe it clean.

I wanted to try the crackling effect on the plastic so I spray painted it a bronzy metallic colour.

Let it dry and applied the crackling medium.The instructions said that one needs to wait till the medium becomes tacky.Well,I couldn't figure out whether it was tacky or not.Also,this medium was meant for acrylic paints and I was using spray paint so I was clueless if it would work out or not.I still applied a topcoat of flat black spray paint over the crackling medium and waited and waited and waited.Okay,I am lying,I just waited for one minute and figured that no crackling is happening.So I took a stiff paintbrush and tried to run it over the black paint to "give the crackle an incentive to crackle".It worked a little bit .The bronze started showing through.Everybody else liked the effect but I didn't so much.So back to the drawing board ...err to the balcony to cover up the mistakes.

I sprayed the whole thing over again with black.Applied two coats.The good thing is that all the experimentation with the crackling and brushing and what not had given some texture so when I applied the coats of paint,it had some sembelance to a wood grain.Also appied a coat of varnish to seal the whole thing.

The next part was beautifying the mirror.Fortunately I could remove the mirror and the cardboard backing from the frame so I did not have to worry about paint getting on those.I then used a stencil and glass etching paste to etch some designs on the mirror.It's very easy folks.

All you need is a stencil.(Contact paper,sticky back paper,transparencies would be best for creating your stencils).You just position it where you want.Secure it with a tape and cover the whole design with an etching paste.Make sure that you use a thick coating.Leave the whole thing alone for 30 minutes.Wash the area with the etching paste under running water.Once the paste is gone,remove the stencil and wipe and dry the surface and you are done.

Note : I did read somewhere that after the 30 minutes of processing time you can transfer the paste back into the bottle and it can be reused.I didn't try it this time though.

Here's the end result :

Okay, so the next item on the agenda is beautifying the frame.I did not want to overembellish it so I chose a grosgrain ribbon and glued it to the vertical edeges of the mirror.

All done.The whole description sounds tedious but the actual work did not take too much time and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Hope you do too.

Note : Oh my Gawd!Have you ever tried photographing a mirror.Royal pain in the A***!Husband and I kept trying to figure out how to picture it without any distracting reflections showing up in it.Painful,I must say.So please do not go by the pics alone.It truly looks much nicer than it does in the pic.Take my word for it.;-)


Cheers!

Sumi

Submitting it for the CSI Challenge