A Good Life: Crafting Sundays

Remember back in July when I blogged about turning junk into beauty? Well, 3 months later, I finally got around to it! At least, one craft.

Remember in that July blog, this picture:

That grey metal frame is actually a mirror! I got it at a garage sale for $3. The grey frame is actually tin, and is a little weathered and rusty. Which immediately drew me to it. Very antiquey looking...me likey :)

I have enough mirrors in my apartment, but what I really wanted was an ever-changing menu chalkboard in my kitchen! So I went to work with my handy-dandy tools...

First thing to do was to pop out the mirror. Whoever put this together slapped some putty glue in the corners of the mirror to hold it in place. Great idea, but I didn't want it there anymore. So it was a bit of a challenge. I used a retractable blade knife to get under the putty glue and scrape it out. Took me about 10 minutes, and a few small cuts here and there on my fingers. Yikes.

I was trying to think of what I would put in place of the mirror to paint with the chalkboard spray-paint, when I read the spray bottle and realized you could actually spray-paint glass and mirrors! Perfect. Saved me money. I cleaned the mirror with windex, let it air dry for a bit, then went to work on spray painting with the chalk-board paint. I sprayed 3 coats and let dry for about 6 hours (you definitely don't need to let it dry that long, but I had never spray painted on glass/mirror before and it seemed like a slippery surface compared to wood or drywall, so I wanted to be sure it wouldn't ruin when I wrote on it).

After the mirror/new chalk-board dried, I set it carefully back in the tin frame, and needed something to hold it tightly in place. I don't have putty glue, but I have TONS of hot glue sticks! I love my trusty hot glue gun. We've been through a lot together. Woodworking crafts, fabric fixer-ups, basket making, Christmas decorations...oh the list goes on. The mirror fits snugly in the frame, so I just needed to make sure it wouldn't fall back into the wall when I wrote on it. I hot glued all around the frame, 2 layers of hot glue. Waited for it to dry and...

Had to prepare to hang it! The only thing there is to hang it from is this dinky little hook. It makes me a little nervous since the mirror is a bit heavy, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will hold. I decided to nail the wall in 2 places: where the hook is, and where the mirror ends/frame begins. To measure how far apart it was, I just used some tape, cut it the length, and put it on the wall where I wanted it hung up...