Just Sayin' : Sunburst Mirror

My mom has been asking for a mirror for over a year now. I thought about buying a cute mirror from some place, but then I stumbled upon this sunburst mirror idea from Our Humble A{Bowe}dand I had to do it! It was a lot of fun, frustrating, and time consuming, but definitely well worth it! This is how I did it.

You'll need:
- Paint (I picked two different shades, brown & gold)
- about 50 paint sticks
- saw
- circle mirror (ours had a 8" diameter)
- gorilla glue (or some other super duper glue)
- hot glue gun
- picture hanger

The first thing you'll need to do is saw off the paint sticks. I would suggest only sawing off the top layer paint sticks. You can find out how many you need on the top & second layer by placing them around the mirror (look below for more guidance) in the way you want them to look.
The curve part doesn't look good. I had my husband saw off right at the end of the curve (I love having a man around!). It's okay if it's not perfect because it'll go on the back and be hidden. My husband just used a hand saw because that's all we have.

Once they're cut you can start painting! If you're doing two colors you will want your top layer sticks (the sawed off ones) to be one color and the second layer another color.
Get some good music or a movie going and start painting. Unfortunately I don't have pictures of every single step (I'm still getting used to documenting everything and I was very excited to be working on the project), but you can still get the idea.

I got my movie ready!

I painted them all the brown color and went back to touch up the top layer and did the 2nd layer with a coat of gold. It didn't look like much when it was wet, but after it dried it looked great!

Then, you may want to find the center of your circle mirror. We found it and used it to keep the paint sticks going at the same angle. I then hot glued them on once I found how I wanted them to look. I've heard of some people using gorilla glue here. You can choose to do whatever you like. I was pretty emotional/frustrated because the gorilla glue takes awhile to dry and the sticks kept moving on me. So I used a glue gun to get rid of the extra frustration.

Looking good so far! That's the top layer (the brown that I chose). Once they are all dry and you like the way it looks, start the second layer.

I accidentally sawed off all of our sticks and so we didn't have that much of a contrast between the two layers. That's why you should have not sawed off the second layer. Learn from my mistakes! I glued on 1/4 of the sticks and turned it over to see how it looks.

I like it so far! I went around the enter mirror, putting a second layer stick in the middle of the top layer paint sticks while eyeballing to make sure they are sticking out around the same length.

Once I finished gluing it all on, I went back to put on my picture hanger. I used gorilla glue and put it (by measuring) on so that the mirror would hang perfectly. Once again, I got too excited about this project and didn't get pictures of EVERYTHING. I'll be sure to take one of the back and when it's hung up later.

I put a heavy book on the hanger and let it dry for about 2 days. Then it was stuck on there and my mirror was ready to go!