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Create Unique Wall Art For Under $25 Using An Old Mirror & Wood Shims

Since I refinish furniture for a living, I have quite the inventory. I went into my stain cabinet and picked out 6 colors that I thought would look great together.

*Cherry

*Dark Walnut

*Weathered Gray

*Carbon Gray (my personal favorite)

*Vintage Aqua

*Red Mahogany

You don’t have to use this many colors, you don’t even have to stain the shims at all, this is the creative process and completely up to you. We also thought about doing an ombre pattern next 🤔

Grab some supplies such as an old paintbrush that you don’t mind throwing out afterwards (I hate cleaning up oil based products), and a couple sponge applicators.

Put on a pair of gloves and apply the stains to the shims.

When applying the stain, immediately wipe off the excess with paper towels or rags.

I mixed it up a bit with a few shims and applied one color to half the shim and another color to the other half. Or just a stripe down the middle with one color, and another color on the sides. Create unique patterns and looks with the stains

I left a couple of the darker colored shims natural.

You can see the variety of color and they all go with one another.

While allowing the stain to dry, move onto the frame.

I didn’t want to leave the mirror frame plain ole’ white because that’s just not my style.

Clean the frame first. I used Frenchic’s Sugar Soap. It’s a non toxic cleaner that’s great to use before painting or sanding.

To get the look on the mirror, I took my electric sander with 150 grit sandpaper on it and heavily distressed the mirror.

*Before sanding, make sure your frame is wood and not plastic

I then went over it with Frenchic Furniture Paint’s clear wax. These waxes are the best on the market! They are so creamy, go on smooth, and don’t even have to be buffed! I personally prefer a matte-satin finish, so I usually choose not to buff the wax. But if you want a more glossy finish, buff away 😁

And the microfiber car wax sponges that I use for furniture wax, love them! I get them off Amazon. They make it really easy and apply the wax evenly

Now, grab Frenchic’s Browning Wax and a small detail paintbrush

Add the browning first to the details and nooks & crannies.

Then take the wax sponge and go over the entire frame with Browning Wax. This will darken the color as well as the wood that’s peaking through.

Frenchic’s Browning Wax is a versatile product. I use it all the time for aging pieces, but it can also be used as a wood stain! If you put it on bare wood, the wood will soak up the wax and give a beautiful medium-dark brown color as well as seal it.

Silly me was so excited to get the shims into place, I totally forgot to clean the mirror first. It took me forever to clean the mirror after the shims were in place and info not recommend it 😆 So, clean the mirror now

The fun part….lay out the stained shims in the design you want. Again, you can get creative, you don’t have to follow this exact design if you’re not in love with it.

But, if you want to recreate this design, you’ll lay down that middle row first. Then the top row so that the end butts up to the shims in the middle row, and finally lay down the bottom row, again butting up the edges to the middle row pieces. If using the same size mirror that we did, you should only need to cut one shim. They are really easy to cut by hand. A good pair of scissors or tin snips do the job perfectly. Measure and cut the thin strip you need to finish up the bottom.

For the texture, we did 2 shims facing one way, 2 shims the other way, continuing on with this alternating sequence for each row. This allows some thick ends to butt up/lay next to thin ends, as well as some to match up – thick-thick, thin-thin.