Rays of light

There is no shortage of sunburst mirror tutorials out there, and like most of my projects, the one I made is a combination of a few things I've seen out there. It's primarily based on this tutorial from Crazy Wonderful based on wood shims, but I made three specific changes to mine:

1. I chose to make the bursts on mine all consist of five shims each, and I used 12" shims. I glued each together with Gorilla Glue, then used masking tape to bind each grouping tightly together until they dried. Here's just one of my "bursts" of five shims:

2. I wanted a mirror that was more minimal than the one on Crazy Wonderful, so I just bought an unframed one from Jo-Ann Fabrics.

3. The most important difference is that I used gold leaf on my mirror. I started out by spray painting the assembled wood shims with gold paint but it still looked very wood-like to me, and it was hard to get a nice look even after sanding down the glue that seeped out during the gluing process. They gold-leafed a DIY sunburst mirror on one of my favorite HGTV shows, The High-Low Project, so I gave it a whirl too. Gold leaf sheets are pretty easy to apply. They come in a book of 25 sheets, and you also need to buy the adhesive spray. I got mine from Michael's Crafts.

Here's another take on the sunburst mirror, and a much lighter version at that, recently completed by my crafty friend, Mel. Finally, this is what my mirror looks like on the wall in our guest room. It's made even more beautiful paired with the dresser I just refinished. More on that in my next post!