more pinterest-inspired crafting!

as is.. well, pretty much everyone.. i'm addicted to pinterest. the three major ways i use it is to hoard recipes (which is going fantastically - i've cooked more in the past few weeks than i have all summer), to take note of fun party decoration ideas (for the.. uh.. one party i throw every year or two) and to organize DIY decorating ideas, even though history has proven repeatedly that i am neither artsy nor craftsy. yet i fantasize about hosting whimsically-decorated parties where i serve delicious food to people while they comment admiringly at all the decor which, they are shocked to learn, i made myself. self-depricating laugh!

uh, anyway. i have this sliver of wall that had been bugging me, because it was very empty. please pretend i have access to Fancy Editing Softwares (and didn't just paste some offwhite rectangles onto this picture) since i neglected to take a "before" picture... but here is chris's entertainment system area.
directly to the right of the entertainment shelf thing is a door to the patio - a door which opens INwards - which severely limited the size & shape of the shelf chris was able to stick there for electronics, or else the door wouldn't open all the way.

tooootally nothing on the wall in this shot, either...

when i moved in and started doing what girls do (read: hanging things on walls, adorning surfaces with tchotchkes) i never put anything on that wall since, you know, a door opens into it. also it's a skinny awkward area, and with the fireplace already offcenter on that wall i didn't want to draw attention to the imbalance.

well. then decided all of that reasoning didn't matter, and the door is practically NEVER open anyway, and that wall needed something, darn it. inexplicably, i decided that that something was a set of small mirrors.

enter the 2812735763 homemade sunburst mirrors posted on pinterest. the one that caught my eye was this one, originally from nesting place.

pretty, right? and it's made from posterboard! i figured i could do something similar, but on a smaller scale. three small mirrors, hung vertically, with interesting-yet-not-overwhelming cardstock that would bring in some colors from the room. (don't i sound fancy?)

i went to michael's and bought some patterned scrapbook paper, some cheap small mirrors, and then at the last minute grabbed stick-on mosiac tiles to create borders around the mirrors to try and fancy things up a bit. then i got to work cutting out various sized leaf/wedge/burst petal things to see what size and shape would work.

what didn't work: that fat one.

i found a layering pattern for the petals i thought would work and taped together my scrap paper pieces about 1/4 of the way around the mirror as a model. then i cut out one meeeeeellion little wedges from the nicer scrapbook paper.

i neglected to take photos of this process, but i more or less followed the original blog post. i used that skinny petal in the photo as my guide and traced it onto a folded scrapbook piece (to make sure all the pieces were symmetrical) and then glued each piece on with a gluegun. i did all the tiling around the mirror rims first, actually, THEN got to hotglueing.

here's the result:

i'm not 100% sold on them yet, BUT i am pleased that they don't look entirely like reluctantly displayed artwork from a second grader. you can't tell in that last shot, but the 2 brown ones especially have a bit of dimension to them since the paper is thick - more like the original version i copied - so they don't look quite so much like 2D stickers glued to the wall as that picture implies.

so now that makes two pinterest diy projects that weren't complete busts! i'm practically martha over here.