I think this was my favorite gift to give, and admittedly, hard to part with! I so badly wanted to be selfish and keep it for myself, but instead it went to my sister and looks darling in her house.
This mirror was a labor of love, and I’m pretty sure there’s about 50 pounds of hot glue on that thing.
Here’s what I did (I’m warning you now that these aren’t very detailed instructions):
- 1 -
I had originally hoped to buy a round mirror at the craft store and then just hot glue the driftwood directly to it, but luckily I found this lovely seashell mirror at TJ Maxx that looked like it’d seen better days. So I bought it for $5 and I’m so thankful I did because it already had the hangers on the back which made it much easier to install.
- 2 -
I used a hammer to bust all of the seashells off of it and this part actually ended up being a lot more time consuming than I was anticipating. Sometimes they came off in big chunks, other times they took the paint with them. Ugh. Let’s just say it wasn’t the easiest process…and I’m still stepping on pieces of seashells…7 months later.
- 3 & 4 -
The finished project! There really was no rhyme or reason to gluing the wood on the frame. I did sand the frame down prior to starting so that the driftwood would hold better, but that’s about it. I did 1 layer all the way around first, then went back and added a second later, and at the end, glued a few random pieces in where it looked necessary.
At the very end I also added a “faux bow”, basically just took a couple scraps of linen from another project so that it looks like that’s what’s holding the mirror.
- I made it first so you can learn…but here’s what I would’ve done differently -
If I were to do this project again (and I really have been meaning to make one for our own home for the past 7 months), I would probably sand down the edges of all the pieces so that they stuck a little better, like I did for the | driftwood candleholder | I would also probably trim down the edges that are closest to the mirror, just so that it looks a little more crisp.
Other than that, I love the way the mirror turned out!
