31 Oct 2013

The remains of a wardrobe part 2: the mirror

ελληνικό κείμενο

Hello everyone!

It still feels like summer here at least in the morning so I admit I wasn't inspired to do any fall decoration at all.
Instead I will show you a mirror I made out of an old wardrobe door a couple of months ago. It is not a complete tutorial, more of a before and after post with some tips. Except I forgot to take a picture of the before.
 




Luckily I had posted a picture of the door decorated for Easter, you can see it here. This door is what was left from an old wooden wardrobe we took out of the basement in pretty bad situation. The other piece that was saved is this.

I found this vintage bicycle print on The vintage fairy (where you can also find tons of vintage goodies) and had it printed in a photocopy shop. The reason why I didn't print it on my inkjet printer was that I wanted to avoid the ink to bleed during the procedure I intended to follow.




I wanted to turn the crisp white paper (not so white in the picture) into vintage looking. So I made a strong tea and soaked the paper with it with a brush and tried not to do it evenly, on the contrary I made darker stains here and there.




I also sprinkled some instant coffee in places with my fingers.




I let it dry and the result was exactly what I needed.




The wardrobe door had been already taken to a glazier who had cut and glued a mirror in the lower part. I spread glue on the entire surface of the upper frame, pasted my image and covered it with a couple of coats of water based acrylic varnish, the kind we use on wood.




For a little while I couldn't decide whether I liked the folds that where formed or not but in the end I found that they serve perfectly the style I wanted to achieve. We hang the mirror on the entrance wall, it is more decorative rather than practical since we can just see our bodies (only the kids are able to see their heads too, sometimes it 's a good thing to be short) but it adds depth and light to the space and exactly that old, worn feeling I wanted for this spot.









This post links to: 
Inspire me Monday

7 comments:

zina said...

amazing idea! and the result is superb!

Julie @ followyourheartwoodworking said...

Beautiful mirror!

Meeha Meeha said...

I don't care if the before pictures are missing, the large mirror is beautiful, soothing to look at. It is so... you!

Terry O. said...

I love this mirror. You did a beautiful job! Was the image from Graphics Fairy originally 72 dpi? I'm curious about the process you used if the image was 72 dpi originally because whenever I use free images found on the Internet, they are almost 72 dpi. I can never enlarge them without getting a big mess. :-) Thank you!

TinaA said...

Unfortunately I have trouble signing in my Pinterest account where I have pinned this image and I can't tell exactly how large it was. I remember there were two versions of the image, the one with a vintage background was not large enough and when I enlarged it didn't look right. And the one I used, with white backround which I had to "age" with tea which was larger and fited the size of the door.

Terry O. said...

Thanks for your helpful response! I appreciate it. It sounds as if I need to look a bit closer at the images at The Graphics Fairy. Maybe she offers two sizes on the images. Thanks again!

Terry O. said...

Thanks for your helpful response! I appreciate it. It sounds as if I need to look a bit closer at the images at The Graphics Fairy. Maybe she offers two sizes on the images. Thanks again!