Last week I showed you what I did with my gang-tagged alley dresser ... here's the next project. A mirror I spotted in the basement "office" of my building's maintenance guy. I said, "wow, that's really interesting - what's it from?." The lovely Macedonian man said "eh, that thing? You want it? It's yours!" I said ... er... um ... well, I wasn't really ... umm... yeah, ok. Thanks. I think?? The thing was a mess. Apparently I'm attracted to messes.
Ok. First, it was filthy. What you're seeing is a clean version. It was also cracked and all the corners were destroyed. The floral detail was all made using some kind of plaster molding.
After cleaning it, I faced the nails. Lots and lots of very old nails that had to be prized away from the mirrors before I could life them out. Yeah, that was fun. Then I got busy with wood glue and repaired a lot of cracks and lose pieces.
And then, finally, the corner repair! I chipped away what was left of the old plaster molding, and glued in these little flat, decorative wood details from a craft store (about $2?). They were the closest thing I could find to "floral" that would also fit in the space. Perhaps not quite "in character" with the mirror... but hey, I was about to paint it a sort of slap-you-in-the-face blue.
And behold ... slap-your-face blue paint. Full disclosure - I didn't think it would be quite so bright. But it grew on me.
Much like a TV cooking show, I'm sparing you the part where I clean every mirror many many times (100 years of grime?) and then painstakingly bend back every (every!) damn nail. What you are seeing in this image is a set of metallic paints. I'm no artist, but something was missing from the flat blue... so I used a little silver paint to add highlights.
And there she is. My new entry-way mirror (kinda - it's actually hanging in my craft room).
Hanging in the company of some amazing art created by my friend Meg Peterson (manager of 21 Artists). The blue in the paintings was (obviously) the inspiration for the color I chose to paint the mirror. Thank you Meg.
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