DIY Sunburst Mirror with Wood Shims

Today I wanted to share another art project that I did for our guest bedroom.

A 32" wide sunburst mirror that I made for about $43, using wood contractor shims like these.

Lowes

I've been in love with sunburst mirrors for a while now--pretty much as soon as they started appearing on design blogs. So it was finally time to jump on the bandwagon, although I wasn't about to spend $200-300 on a store bought one.

Instead, I'd been collecting inspiration for DIY versions. Some that I liked were more pointy, and made from sticks or metal.

 

 HGTV

 

YHL

 I was also drawn to some that were almost more flower-like than suns, but still very pretty.

 

Amazon.com

I almost went with this option, because it looked super easy to make it out of poster paper.

 The Nester

But in the end, I based my sunburst mirror off of one of the DIY versions made from wood shims, because I thought a truer sun shape would work better with the loose beachy theme in the guest bedroom than a flower-like one would. There was a great round up of shim sunburst mirrors on Little Green Notebook a while ago, and this was my favorite.

Create Live Design via Little Green Notebook

So I set out to make my own, and it actually went a lot quicker than I thought it would. All I used was:

- Gorilla wood glue and hot glue (already had)
- painters tape (already had)
- 8 packs of these smaller wood shims ($1.57 each)
- 4 packs of these larger wood shims ($3.87 each)
- a few pieces of 1/2 inch thick scrap plywood (already had)
- 2 sawtooth picture hangers (already had)
- full can of metallic gold spray paint ($5.98 )
- a round mirror ($8.63)

The tutorial at Create Live Design is quite good to follow, but I wanted to add a few of my own notes on how to make things easier.

Your first step is to group the wood shims into manageable segments, gluing them together with wood glue, and using a strip of tape to hold them together while the glue dries. I grouped the smaller shims into groups of 7 and the larger into groups of 9. It took me probably 1 - 1 1/2 hours to get them all glued and taped together. One thing that was a big time saver, and made my spacing look even across all of the groups of shims was to use my cutting mat lines as spacing guides for the shims. I lined things up so each staggered end is an inch from the adjacent staggered edge.

Then I just wrapped a piece of tape around the middle to let them dry, and repeated the process with the larger shims. I ended up only needing 15 groupings of each to make my sunburst, but the other tutorial suggested 16 of each, so that was how many I made.

I let the wood glue dry for about 6 hours, and then it was time for the assembly. After removing the tape, I laid all of my grouped shims out in a sunburst pattern until I was happy with how they fit together. Some of the shims had rougher sides, so I made sure to lay those face up, so they would be on the back side of the sunburst.

Then I just gently picked up the larger shim groupings, ran wood glue down the sides, and gently slid them back into the grouping, so I could quickly and easily glue them together without messing up the sunburst shape. Once the shims were all glued together, I attached two little pieces of scrap plywood to the back with more glue, to hold the picture hardware. These pieces also helped give a little stability to the overall structure of the sunburst, and you could just use one bigger piece of plywood if you wanted (but I was lazy and didn't feel like cutting down a bigger piece, so I just used what I found on our garage floor!).

I let the wood glue dry overnight, and then took it outside the next morning to spray paint it. I just propped it up on an upside down bucket to keep the edges exposed. The Valspar metallic gold paint I used said to recoat at any time, so I just kept walking in circles around and around the sunburst, laying on thin coats and making sure to really get in between the shims, until the can was empty.

Once the spray paint was dry, I brought it inside and it was time to attach the mirror with some hot glue.

After letting the hot glue dry for a few minutes, all I had to do was flip it over, nail in the sawtooth picture hangers, and it was time to mount it on the wall. I put in two drywall anchors first, since it isn't the lightest of mirrors, and especially since it was going above the guest bed.

And here is the finished and mounted sunburst mirror, all shiny and golden with the bedside lights on.

I'd never used Valspar spray paint before (usually I'm a Rust-Oleum girl), but I was pretty impressed with the look of the metallic paint. Even with the lights off, the gold was is still pretty luminous.

And a close up. The smaller shims were smoother on the edges than the larger shims, which I really liked, especially when painted. It gives a really nice, but subtle, texture to the different "rays" of the sunburst.

So, that was the final project for the guest bedroom that I completed last week, after the painting issues, building a new headboard and updating an apothecary table, and vinyl stenciling the backs of bookcases and making some shell art. All that was left was pulling together the bedding and accessories, and our guest room was finally done (or, done enough for now, since I don't know if I'll ever really be able to call a room 100% done).

Have you jumped on the sunburst mirror bandwagon? Anyone tried to make their own?