Mirror, Mirror
I mentioned previously that I wanted to have mirrors covering one of the diner’s walls. I had bought a few small mirrors at A.C. Moore a long time ago and had toyed with the idea of cutting one of these down to size so that there would be a continuous line of the along one wall. Because cutting the piece of Plexiglas with my special cutter had worked so well, and after having read up on glass cutting I thought that I would it a try.
The plan was to have a silver painted narrow strip of wood at the top and bottom of the mirrors. I couldn’t find a piece of wood strip to fit my needs. So I took one that I cut to the right length to fit along the wall and then cut in half lengthwise. I really wanted to paint it with metallic silver model paint, but I didn’t want to deal with the fumes and needing to have the windows open on a cold winter day. Instead I used metallic silver acrylic paint.
I glued one of the pieces to the wall just behind the booth. Then I glued the small mirrors in a line until I ran out of space for a complete mirror. I held the small mirror over the empty space and drew a mark on it so I would know how narrow to cut it. Next, I placed it face down on my desk and using the mark as a guide, drew a line all the way across. I placed a strip of masking tape along the line I’d drawn and then put on safety goggles and gloves. I started cutting along one side of the masking tape with my plasticutter tool.
As I continually cut along the same line, I noticed that all that seemed to be happening was that I was scraping off the silver backing from the mirror in a thin line and wasn’t really cutting into the mirror itself. There was a cut in the glass, but it wasn’t too deep. When I cut the Plexiglas, I had scored it and then was able to snap it apart. I tried this with the mirror and instead of a clean break it splintered a bit. The piece that I had been trying to cut away from the mirror was streaked on the lower portion with scratches so it was unusable. It was disappointing that this didn’t work. I decided to trim the silver wood strip so it was flush with the last mirror on the wall. I trimmed the second piece of wood strip to the same length and glued this in place above the line of mirrors.Making the clock
In Kath Dalmeny’s book it shows a clock on the wall and includes an image of the clock face that one could use in their diner. I wanted to use the clock face, but wanted to use an old piece of a key chain of my husband’s. The piece is round and a bit smaller than the book’s clock, so I knew that I would need to make adjustments.
To start, I chose a half round piece of wood strip and cut it into the three pieces. I painted each of these with metallic silver acrylic paint. When the paint was dry, I glued them one by one to the wall over the fake door.
While waiting for the glue to dry, I took the image file of the clock face and put this into my photo editor program to shrink it down. For whatever reason this program doesn’t allow me to print, so I put the image file into Paint and then printed it. I had to adjust the size and print out the image a couple of times before getting the right size that would fit the key chain piece.
Once I had the right size printed out, I cut a piece of thin cardboard and glued the clock face to this. I then centered the key chain piece onto the clock face and glued it in place. I set this aside to dry a bit before gluing onto the silver half rounds on the wall.
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| Diner from Dollhouse Style |
