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Kristen Anne Glover

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Make an Etched Mirror, Plus a Giveaway!!!

Glass etching a mirror

I love old stuff.  I love the dusty smell the years leave behind and the memories tucked into things that have lasted long beyond their owners.

I particularly love old mirrors, the kind that have real silver on the backs and bubbles in the glass and hand-glued labels on the wood.  I haul them home whenever I can, and my husband gives me that husband look that says he doesn’t appreciate blurry, wrecked mirrors the way I do and he wonders if we don’t already have enough already?

As if.

One of the mirrors I scavenged was from a church garage sale.  It was framed with barn boards and the silver was delightfully scratched and it weighed about half as much as me.  I lugged it home and when my husband rolled his eyes, I said, “Don’t worry.  I’m going to do something with this.”

Which, in point of fact, was not the part that worried him.

My plan was to make an etched mirror.  For years, I toyed around with what to do.  I even bought supplies to make my own stencil, but I couldn’t quite find the right thing and I was a little afraid I would ruin the mirror (never mind the fact that my husband thought it was too late for that).

So, I was thrilled when I turned on my computer one day and found a link a friend shared to Fruitful Vine Creations.  They make gorgeous vinyl wall decals in every shape and size, including the one below.

to walk justly

Micah 6:8 happens to be one of my favorite verses.  I even named a child after that book of the Bible.  I was in love.

The size of this decal was perfect for my mirror.  I knew I could affix the vinyl piece to it and the hardest part of my glass-etching project would be done for me!

Best of all, this particular letter art was being featured that week as the company’s Fruitful Deal.  Every week, they offer one vinyl letter design at a deep discount.  I scored this design for 50% off!

Once my order arrived, I positioned the vinyl decal on my mirror.

Vinyl Wall Art

Then, I secured the design with tape on one edge and peeled the back off.  This way, I could flip the design back onto the glass.  (All the directions are included in the package, and they are super easy to follow, so don’t worry if that part doesn’t make sense.  It will when you see their step-by-step tutorial).

I squeegeed the design onto the glass, pushing out air bubbles and making sure the design was stuck on tight.  Since I was going to be applying glass etching acid to the top of this vinyl, I wanted to make sure all the edges were sealed.

Fruitful Vine Creations

Once that was done, I carefully pulled the top sheet off.  The decal was perfectly positioned underneath.

Applying Vinyl to a Mirror

Now it was time to get to work with the etching. 

To etch glass at home, all you need is glass etching goo.  This is what I used to do the job.  This is the link to the product description on my Amazon affiliate page.  But,  it’s crazy expensive.  I highly recommend using a coupon and getting it at your local craft store if you can.  I got mine at Hobby Lobby for 40% off.

Armour Etch

Using a paint brush, smear that stuff all over the mirror, right on top of the vinyl, until it is evenly coated.

Glass Etch

The product is a little lumpy.  Ignore.

The directions on the Armour Etch say to leave the product on for 60 seconds.  I tested this with a smaller bottle and that amount of time was not nearly sufficient.  Maybe it’s because my mirror is very old and things were made better back in the day.  I don’t know.  But I had to go back and purchase another bigger bottle and try again.

Bother.

I let it sit for about fifteen minutes, or until I could see the glass was cloudy underneath.  Then, I washed off the creme, cleaned the mirror, and let it dry.

Decorate a mirror

You will notice that the glass-etching product did not take evenly.  Grrr…I am telling myself that the variations in cloudiness are in keeping with the weathered look of the mirror.  I may go back and purchase another jar of Armour Etch if I decide not to leave my children an inheritance.

You will also notice that the vinyl looks just as good as it did before I applied the acid.  In fact, a simple design might be able to be used again.

For me, it was time to remove the vinyl letters and see if the etching worked.

Glass Etching

It did!

This particular design from Fruitful Vine Creations is very delicate, so I was a little worried that the acid might get underneath the thin parts.  It didn’t.  The vinyl stuck tight, just like it was supposed to, and gave me beautiful, crisp lines.

Vinyl Glass Etching

It’s hard to tell because the mirror creates a double image, but the lines are so clean.  You can even feel them with your fingers, just like on real etched-glass.

Glass etching mirrors

I love the way the Scripture verse looks on the mirror.  The light catches the words in different ways at different times, and it is beautiful.  Even my husband has to admit that this old mirror isn’t so bad.

Aren’t you all dying to get your hands on some vinyl letter art so you can create your own etched mirror masterpiece???

You are in luck!  I contacted Tonya over at Fruitful Vine Creations and told her what amazing readers I have and how much you all would love to shop on her site.  She offered to give you all a chance to win a $50 shopping spree from Fruitful Vine Creations!  This gift certificate can be used on anything in their store, including shipping!  The only exclusions are the My Fruitful Deal decals (which are already a smashing great price, you might just want to sign up for their sale e-mails so you don’t miss any).

To enter, just fill out the Rafflecopter below!  I will draw a winner at 6 pm Monday, April 14.  Enjoy!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Leave a comment.

Crafts, Decorating, Home, Uncategorized 34 Comments

Bed, Bath, and Beyond

That last time I left you on our continuing house tour, we had just visited the main bathroom in our home.  Today, we’ll cruise through the upstairs bedrooms and master bath, which are all located a half-flight of stairs up from the great room where, if you recall, I hung a crib on the wall at the end of the hall.

Crib art

You can sorta kinda see where the staircase is off to the right of the picture below.

Living room

Okay, you can’t really see it at all.  This was really just an excuse to show you how my living room looked with my mother-in-law’s rug on the floor.  I borrowed it from her for staging purposes while we were trying to sell our house.

Unfortunately, this picture also shows my craigslist couches.  The moving guy looked at them and said to me, “Are you taking those with you?” and I almost cried.  I told him that if he had an accident and the couches accidentally flew off the back of the truck in the middle of the Nevada desert, I would not blame him.  In fact, I might hug him.  He said he’d make a note of that.

I digress.

I’ve already shown you the kids’ rooms in previous posts, but indulge me a moment while I bombard you with pictures and links from the past because I’m feeling sentimental these days.

This was Faith’s room the way it looked when we first moved in:

Butterfly Chandelier

Here it is after a little work:

Butterfly chandelier

We didn’t do much to her room but paint it with paint from the paint recycle store.  Yellow!  We also replaced the carpet in the entire upstairs (very recently) and trimmed out the rooms with trim we purchased from a building overstock store for pennies on the dollar.

Which brings me to a great money-saving point: adding trim to a house, whether interior or exterior, adds exponential value to the home.  It makes every room look nicer.  However, purchasing trim from a box store is like bleeding money.

If you are fortunate to have a building surplus store in your area (and many urban areas do), check them out for inexpensive woodwork.  Most of the woodwork in our home came from one of those stores.  We even replaced all of our cheap, hollow-core doors with solid wood doors for every room in our home (which you’ll see later).  You’ll die when you hear how much we paid for them.

Back to Faith’s room.  You can’t see her dresser, bookshelf, or keyboard, but you can see her  daybed which was a hand-me-down from friends at church.  If you’ve followed my blog for awhile, you might also recognize the Butterfly Chandelier I  made for her.  It’s one of my all-time favorite projects.  Check out the original post for instructions!

Butterfly Chandelier

Jonathan’s room was right down the hall, although it started out as the twins’ room for the first few years.

That room originally looked like this:

Decorating for boys

You will notice that none of the mint green ice cream paint was wasted in this house.  Not a drip.  It was in the kitchen, hall bathroom, and this room.

I got some blue paint at the paint recycle place, but it was too baby blue for me.  After all, I wanted a room that could grow with my boys, and I didn’t want to have to repaint in a few years.

So, I used the baby blue to paint the wall below the chair rail, then I purchased a glaze in a denim blue and a special brush for creating faux linen texture on walls.  I applied the darker blue glaze in two directions over the free baby blue paint to create a washed denim look.  The end result was just what I wanted: something sweet enough for a baby’s room but cool enough for a pre-teen.

Denim decor

When the twins were in the room, I strung up a bit of twine and hung up some of their outgrown overalls for a fast and cheap way of decorating a large portion of the wall.  Besides, it’s so hard to give away those sweet little baby clothes, isn’t it?

But then the room became Jonathan’s, so I took down the baby clothes and painted giant gears on the wall. 

Easy wall art

His wall art was super easy to do but everyone who walks into the room takes a breath because it looks like I killed myself painting gears on that wall.  But it really wasn’t as big of a project as it seems.  You can see more pictures of Jonathan’s room and check out the tutorial in this post.

His pegboard organizer is another favorite feature in his room.  It helps him keep all his little stuff where it belongs.

Pegboard organizer

Right across the hall from Jonathan’s room is the master bedroom and bathroom.  I don’t have very many pictures of the master bedroom because it is the Final Frontier.  It is the last room I ever clean and the only room I never finished decorating.  By the time I got around to taking pictures of it, I had taken most of the decor down in preparation for moving.  So, apologies all around.

When we bought the house, the room was in sorry shape.  It looked like this:

Master bedroom makeover

Boring, boring, boring.

The walls had a zillion little nail holes and places where someone had tried to putty someone else’s nail holes and I was 8 months pregnant with twins and didn’t have the patience for any of it.

So I got a huge pail of joint compound and a gigantic-o putty knife and I smeared that stuff all over the walls.  I was going for a DIY Venetian plaster look, minus the DIY.

About two hours in, I realized it was probably not a good idea to start smearing joint compound over every single inch of my master bedroom walls when I was eight months pregnant with twins, but because my husband kept walking past every half hour and grunting and saying things like, “Do you know what you’re doing?” and, “Are you sure this is going to look good when you’re done?” (which is entirely the wrong thing to say to a woman who is nesting, especially if she has a full bucket of joint compound at her disposal), I had to continue.

For days.

My husband helped by continuing his half-hour rounds with a camera in hand.  He thought taking pictures of a very pregnant woman standing on a very tiny stool was funny.

It is not.

Also, there’s a very good possibility this is not what the nurses meant by “bed rest.”

Pregnant with twins

But I I finished my Venetian plaster walls before the twins were born, and I love them! 

Are we in Washington or are we in Rome?  I don’t know!

DIY Venetian plaster

After the joint compound dried (which took just about as long as it took my husband to have faith in my artistic vision), I painted the walls with a couple of shades taupe I mixed up from paint I got at the paint recycle place.  I’m telling you, that place saved us so much money!  I just dabbed lighter and darker shades together however my inner Michelangelo dictated and called it good.

DIY Venetian Plaster

Here’s a bigger view so you can see the texture on the walls. Please ignore the rest of the decor–we were moving and it’s kind of embarrassing.  I don’t think a china blue bedspread is Venetian.

DIY Venetian Plaster

In order to distract you from my decorating fail, I will tell you about our doors, as promised.  Those knotty alder doors came from a building surplus store where we found them for $30 each.  I’m pretty sure you can’t even cut down a tree for less than $30.  We collected them as we found them and replaced the cheap, tacky doors in our home with one by one.

It was worth living with mismatched doors for a few years because in the end, our entire house had these, and we didn’t have to pay over $300 apiece for them, which is the going rate at Home Depot.

DIY Venetian Plaster

Ack!  I love those doors.  I really wanted to take them with me to El Paso but I had a feeling the buyer would notice if his bedroom didn’t have a door.

Now, won’t you follow me to the master bathroom?  It was a very scary place when we first bought the house.

master bathroom upgrade

Oh, avert your gaze!  The stick-on vinyl floor tiles multiplied and migrated from the hall bathroom to this bathroom.  There was another builder-grade golden oak vanity, a cheap mirror, and awful brass “beauty bar” lighting.  Ugh.

master bathroom upgrade

Not to mention the fact that whoever installed the toilet paper holder must have had a sense of humor.

We knew we needed to tile the floor, and we really liked the look of natural stone, but it is expensive.  Our solution was to find an inexpensive tile that looked like natural stone, in keeping with the Venetian theme I had totally committed us to.

In order to make the floor look expensive and rich, we bought just a few of the more expensive tiles and scattered them throughout the floor.  I drew out a pattern of the floor and placed the expensive tiles right where I wanted them, and our dear friend from church tiled the whole thing for us.

Bathroom tile

Don’t you just love those little 2″ bronze tiles?

I used some leftover Cabinet Transformations product to redo the bathroom vanity just like I did in the kitchen.  Only this time, I knew what I was in for and I only whined about 30% of the time, and most of that was before I even started.

As it turned out, the bathroom vanity was so much easier to do than an entire kitchen.  The project was completed in less than two days, and most of that time was spent waiting for things to dry.  I didn’t have to work at it full-time like I did with the kitchen.

Cabinet Transformations

I couldn’t wait to take out the ugly brass faucet.  I’m not much of a plumber but I can read directions just as well as the next girl so I hanged out the faucet while Jeff added bronze cabinet pulls to the vanity.

I also built a frame around the cheap mirror using some solid wood trim we picked up at that same building surplus store for just a couple bucks.  I used the Cabinet Transformations product on the wood to make it match the vanity, only I added a strip of antique bronze paint to the inside rim of the frame before I applied the polyurethane coat.

For less than five dollars, that cheap mirror looked like a much less cheap mirror. 

And, I got to use the miter saw again.  Bonus!

Bathroom renovation

Here I am in the shower.  I wanted to get a picture of my less-cheap mirror and the fabulous light fixture I found on craigslist.

I love the architectural element this light fixture brings to the room.  It balances the Venetian thing we have going on.  I didn’t want the theme to get out of hand and have my master suite start looking like a cheap Italian restaurant complete with fake ivy and replicas of naked statues all over the place, which, while classy in Rome are kind of trashy in America.  You know it’s true.

Back to the renovation.  Jeff finished the vanity with a row of glass mosaic tiles in the same chocolate, cream, and bronze colors we had going on in the room already.  LOVE the glass mosaic tiles!

When it was all done, it was hard to believe it was the same room we started with.

Master bathroom renovation

P.S. We also moved the toilet paper holder.

I’ve only got one more stop on the home tour for you and I think I’ve saved the best for last!  Next time, I’ll show you how we added about 500 square feet of useable space to our home.  You won’t believe it!

Decorating, Home 5 Comments

Organizing the Boy

My son is a pack rat.  He saves everything from bits of broken pencil lead to rubber bands to dried flower blossoms.  Recently, we moved him into his own room, and in the process, we purged a large portion of his collection.  By we, I mean I, while he whined and gave me lots of reasons why that broken plastic fork needed to be moved to his new room.

While I wanted to throw away all the bent nails while he was sleeping, being a parent is all about compromise, so I thought about what I could do to make both of us happy.  I wanted a neat, tidy room with a spot for everything.  He wanted to keep all of his treasures.

One day, as I was walking through the garage, I spotted a solution.  My husband had a leftover piece of pegboard from a workbench project.  It was the perfect way for him to display some of his favorite “treasures” without leaving them all over the top of his dresser in one giant heap.

 

The finished product!

One of the edges was damaged, so my husband cut it down for me.  I painted it with some heavy-duty grey porch paint we had on hand.  Painting it was a necessity–it gave the board a finished, almost artistic look which is great because it’s now the focal point of the wall. I would love to make an interesting display out of it, but then my son wouldn’t have any place for his stuff and we’d be back to square one.  But if anyone ever wants to make a giant Battleship headboard, this would be the way to go!

While the paint dried, the boy and I ran to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of hooks, baskets, and other accessories for his board.  I wanted a magnetic strip for the top and bottom, but couldn’t find one so I bought two metal rulers and hot glued them to the painted pegboard.  A couple of magnets, some with clips, allow him to hang up art or other keepsakes.  My husband donated a magnetic knife holder so Jonathan can hang up his pocket knives, but it’s a little too heavy so I’m going to keep looking for a simple strip.  We need to add a few more hooks and some magnetic spice jars for things like nails, but for now, it’s done.  What do you think?

The Pegboard

It will never look this neat again.

 

Decorating, Home 20 Comments

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I believe you can find grace for the mother you are and help to become the mother you long to be—a mom who has the freedom to choose the better things and enjoy her kids right now.

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