the flea market mirror--

Remember the vintage mirror I got, and showed you, from the last Elkhorn flea market of the season?

It has a deep beveled mirror and a great frame!  BUT–it’s not in pristine condition, awww.  I would usually call that character, but in this case—hmmm??

This is why.

The missing silvering near the bottom has created a HOLE.  Ordinarily, not tragic, but someone filled the hole with glittery gold nail polish.  Seriously!  How cREAtive–Not!

This is probably  one of  the craziest fixes  I’ve EVer seen.

On the plus side, it popped off fairly easy!

But dang it, it took a little more silver with it too.

After removing the mirror from the frame (which needed a little repair too),  I used a gel stripper to remove the silver’s painted-protection.

It took a while to cut through the painted back–you have to be patient, and it often takes a couple of times with the stripper to get it off.  The picture below shows the result from the 1st try.  How cool to uncover the manufacture job# !

Once it was all cleaned off, I washed and dried the back of the mirror, then finally began re-spraying the silver using Krylon’s LOOKING GLASS.         Sorry, I got pretty busy at this point and forgot all about taking pictures.

In the past, I’ve played with varying aging techniques.  But this mirror already had NATURAL AGE, so I just wanted good coverage.  Here’s the outcome of my aging mirror!  And–you can see some of the change to the frame here too.

I just laid the mirror on top of the frame to see how it was looking!

–Need to paint protective layer on the silver, but getting back to the frame–

Sometimes all you need to do is “dirty” something up!  I like to use gel stains for that, and my favorites are Early American and Golden Pecan.  I used the liquid gold leafing to re-frame the “fillet” of the frame, I’m guessing that was probably the original accenting finish.

After all the repairs and finishes!

Someone who really loves old mirrors will understand and appreciate the “worn condition!”  I would love to keep it, but, “You can’t keep EVerything!”

–click on the picture to see the finishes closer up, it came out really fAb!–

Catherine

I’m sharing my mirror with these gREAt linky parties!

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