SUNBURST mirror

I have seen a lot of Sunburst mirrors around lately, and thought I would give it a try.

  My inspiration mirror is from Ballard Designs 

Ballard Designs Sunburst Mirror

 If any of you are crazy enough to try this, I will attempt to explain the method to my madness! I really should have paid more attention in math. It all starts with a 35 inch paper circle. This took me a while and then I started folding and folding and folding until I got what I liked. You will have 72 different wedges. I then found a mirror at Target for 10 bucks and based everything on it's size. I centered the mirror on the paper circle and used it as a pattern.

I used scraps out of my garage so in all this project cost me about 15 dollars, but tons of my precious time!:) I also hit the scrap bins at Home Depot for some thin plywood. The mirror's top wood was extra (paneling?) scraps in my garage. I cut with my jigsaw two halves to make a circle and then marked three inch increments around the circle. I then realized I needed to make each wedge smaller, down to

1 1/2 inch marks.

After numbering, I cut it all up. I numbered because I can't cut straight and knew that I would have to put it back together like a puzzle for the pieces to look decent.

I used wood glue and quickly spaced them out evenly around the mirror as my guide. When you cut with a saw you lose some of your wood, so your left with some gaps. Just space evenly, I remembered from building a pinewood derby car for my son that they use two pieces of card stock glued together to space the wheels. This actually worked really well spacing the pieces. Later, I filled in with wood filler to slightly fill gaps.

I backed the overlaying frame with a full piece of thin plywood. I used heavy duty glue and some make-shift clamping :) to make sure it was flat. I also primed it all.

I don't have a picture of the paint. I actually made a few mistakes and it led to this color. I wanted the mirror to be silver, but the wood was so crummy it didn't look very nice and sleek. So, I decided to distress the wood and add some brown antiquing glaze.

Surprisingly, it came out looking very similar to the color of Ballard Design's mirror. Distressing also hid my many imperfections and lack of quality wood. I believe Ballard's mirror is made of Mango wood.