Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

So, I feel that I am a quasi decent crafter/diyer/baker/homemaker/etc and thought I might give the whole crafty blog thing a go.  Mostly because I'm a narcissist that loves to brag but also because I'm thinking with this whole Pinterest explosion going on that people seem to enjoy finding new crafts and decorating ideas to try.  So here is my contribution to the masses..."see Cbuss craft!"  (I know, you are literally shaking with excitement, right??)

The 4th of July is a day that I have grown to love.  Mostly because my husband is generally working that day and I'm by myself, off work, left to my own devices (not that I don't like spending time with him, but sometimes I just want a day-o-crafting without the guilt of ignoring him for 8 hours).  Last year I spent the entire day scrapbooking our wedding.  (Still an ongoing project, btw...my first goal was to have that finished by the end of our first year of marriage.  Since we're currently on year three I've revised this goal to be completed before children come along.  Let's hope that gets done.)  This year I also had hopes for working on that scrapbook but I also had one other project to complete that I've had on the proverbial to-do list for about a year now.  My mom gifted me an old gold-toned mirror and I've been wanting to "do" something with it for awhile now.  In the meantime, I fell in love with a $300+ mirror from an online retailer you can see here:  really-pretty-but-definitely-not-in-my-budget-mirror.  Since Craig (aka "el husbanjo"; yes I know I just made up a Spanish word for husband that probably means something more like "bathroom"), would laugh at me as though I was a crazy person for even suggesting buying said mirror, I decided to try and make something relatively similar with the mirror my mom had given me.  Which brings me to my 4th of July day craft....

I started with the mirror, two things of paint (one is the leftovers of the paint sample from our living room, the other a multi surface acrylic from the Martha Stewart line at Michael's in a satin, and some silk florals from Walmart.

I taped the mirror off to make the mess a little less messy...

Then came the fun part?  Hand painting the mirror and silk flowers.  I felt a little like the guys from Alice in Wonderland when they're painting the roses...

  *Note, I didn't end up using the pink zinnia looking flowers...I just didn't like them as much as the others.  I started with the blue wall color first, painted the flowers, leaves, and mirror.  I let those dry and then "rough brushed" (I don't know if that's really a thing, I just made up the term...) white over the blue so they look distressed.  You can see the color difference a little below with the one flower having been painted over with white and the rest still with blue only.  (I used scrapbook paper scraps as my "drying off surface" because I was too lazy to clean them up before I started...)



After they dried (sort of, I'm impatient sometimes...) I hot glued them on the corners of the mirror.  The flowers stiffen up quite a bit when they dry and don't look like silk florals anymore. 

And so you have it!

A little tedious?  Yes, definitely.  But I think well worth it and I am quite the fan of how it turned out.  Craig even seemed impressed and that doesn't always happen.  All in all, it took about $15 worth of materials (but the mirror was free...) and 2 hours of my day (plus drying time). 

Hopefully I'll be back with more soon....I've tried and failed to keep a blog in the past and I'm not always great about taking pictures, but I'll try!