DIY: Pink Mirror Transformation

I'm so glad to have gotten such a huge response to my "Secrets to Successful Fashion Blogging" guide. You loved it, ELLE magazine loved it, IFB loved it...I'm still talking about it. I can't shut up about how excited I am that my guide actually made any coherent sense, better yet, it actually helped some of you guys, and best of all, some of you implemented blog-bettering changes right away. I'm so happy for you all!! Your excitement makes me excited!

Depending on how long you've been reading Pretty Shiny Sparkly, you may or may not remember this post in which I transformed a lifeless thrifty mirror found at a discount store into something suitable for my office. Well, now that we've moved, we'd been in a bit of a conundrum with this mirror. You see, we already have an embarrassingly large amount of mirrors in our now-shared study, so the mirror had to go someplace else.

We decided on the bedroom. But since I have recently replaced all of our bed linens with new ones (from Shabby Chic) the color scheme is totally different. Blue would, obviously, clash with light khaki and pale, pale pink.

So, the poor thing had to endure my DIY painting attempts for yet a second time this year. Please give my mirror some love for all the hard work he (er...she?) has had to go through!

Aaaand apparently I gave my mirror a sex change as well.

I used painter's tape and trash bags cut open into rectangles to line the mirror itself as well as my surroundings (who needs to buy a tarp when you can improvise with what you have??).

So, this photo is a little deceiving. This is the pink I originally used (two whole coats, mixed with that white you see there). You'll see later that plans changed when I realized the pink didn't actually quite match enough with my color scheme.

Here's one layer of spray paint primer. I did two full coats - it covered that bright blue quite nicely, much to my surprise!

In the evening, it was time to paint!

As I said before, this was the original pink I started with. I mixed a little white with the pink to lighten it up.

Acrylic paint dries supersuper fast so you have to be quick but you don't require as much waiting time.

My dilemmas here were: a) the paint dried flat - which I was TOTALLY not anticipating, and b) the pink was totally wrong - too warm bubblegum pink, and what I needed was a pale pale pink with almost purple like overtones to it. This put a wrench in the gears and I traveled (yet again) to the craft store the next day to pick up a slightly cooler shade of pink, and a cooler white (called "winter white"). I also picked up a bottle of acrylic "pearlizing medium" which gave it a subtle, pearly sheen that I just knew I would like. You know me + shiny = ♥.

Let's try this again.

Looking good!

After tweaking it with a new double coat of the absolute perfect combination of cool white and peony pink, I took it back outside and sprayed a coat of triple thick clear glaze, which required 24 hours to cure completely before handling. Man, I was itchin' to get it up and hung! By this time it had been almost 4 days.

The wait, and patience were well worth it. Ladies and gents, the big finish:

I can't tell you just how incredibly pleased I am with this. The blue was fun (and way better than the grandma-silver it was originally) but this is just so me! Even HB likes it, amidst grizzly-bear grumbles about the amount of pink accumulating in our bedroom.

I keep sneaking in pink things, hoping he won't notice.

He does.

He lets me do it anyway.