If you want a unique and vintage-esque place to display your jewellery, then look no further than this pretty mirror idea.  If like me, you have a few key pieces of jewellery you wear a lot and want to be more easily accessible than in your jewellery box, then this jewellery stand is a lovely way of showing them off.  You can use any images you want, but I have uploaded some nice copyright free ones to our Flickr photostream for you to use if you want.

What you need:

• Mirror (old or new, old is best as the glass is nicer but I could only find a new one of the right size)
• Printed images (doesn’t matter how they are printed, i.e. laser or inkjet, but the paper needs to be a decent thickness and as a result magazine pages probably won’t work as they’re a bit on the thin side)
• Oven cleaner (take care this stuff is toxic!)
• PVA glue
• Hot glue gun
• Decoupage glue or other suitable one that is for use with glass and dries absolutely clear, I used Diamond Glaze as it’s what I had to hand
• Felt
• Scissors
• Paintbrush
• Rubber gloves
• Something to scrape the silvering off the mirror, ideally a plastic spatula
• Newspaper to protect the table you are working on from the oven cleaner!

1.  A quick word on old versus new mirrors: Older glass will generally show the printed images as floating away from the mirrored parts, the same way that on an old mirror, if you put the edge of a coin against the surface, the reflection shows it as having a bigger gap between the coin and its reflection.  New glass doesn’t show as large a gap and images generally look flatter against the mirror.  So think of what effect you want to create and choose a mirror accordingly.  I love old mirrors but size and shape concerns lead me to use a new one.

2.  First choose which parts of your images you want to use.

3.  You will need to prepare your images, as these will most likely need to be sealed for use with the decoupage glue, as it can cause the ink to bled and spoil the end result.  PVA glue is perfect for this, use the paintbrush to brush on a layer of glue to any parts you want to use.  Err on the side of caution and do a large border around the part you want to use in case you get a bit carried away with the scraping of the silvering and have a bigger area to fill!  (Yes that is what happened to me).

4.  Set the images to one side to dry thoroughly.

5.  Give the mirror a quick clean, particularly if it’s an old one.

6.  Then put down the newspaper to protect your work surface as you will be using oven cleaner and it’s pretty toxic stuff.  So MAKE SURE you wear rubber gloves and work in a WELL VENTILATED area, ideally outside, or at least with all the windows open wide, and follow any other instructions given on the oven cleaner.

7.  Oven cleaner works to break down the silvering and expose the glass where you want to place your images for them to show through.  Put your mirror face down and squirt some oven cleaner roughly where you want the images to go.  Honestly if you go have a cup of tea now and let the oven cleaner do its stuff is the best idea.  If like me you’re a bit impatient then you can watch it and start scraping off the silvering.

8.  Using a plastic spatula is probably the best thing, but as I didn’t have one of those, I used an old rounded butter knife.  This will probably scrape the glass, but as I wanted a shabby chic look, that wasn’t a problem.

9.  This stage takes some time and I’d advise building up the areas gradually in case you’re left with no mirror at all!  I still want to use mine as a mirror so I’m just concentrating on taking off the silvering around the edges.

10.  I washed off the oven cleaner and reviewed the mirror several times before finally counting myself finished.

11.  Now give it one final thorough wash to get rid of all the chemicals and dry let it completely dry.

12.  Next play around with your images and decide what you want to go where and then cute these out.

13.  Use your decoupage glue and put a thin layer on the exposed glass and carefully place your image face down on it so it shows through to the other side.  You may need to do this quite quickly depending on the glue, Diamond Glaze is pretty fast drying and I had a bit of a near miss with a trapped cat hair on my fete image!

14.  If you have any catastrophes and an image doesn’t work, don’t worry, you can carefully remove the image, wash it off and start again, just don’t get the water near any of your other images, because you’ll have to re-do the lot then!

15.  Finish the rest of the exposed areas and then leave it to dry thoroughly.  It really doesn’t look too pretty right now!  But don’t worry about that, we are going to use some felt to cover the back completely and tidy it up, so thankfully any near misses can be hidden!

16.  Next you need to completely stick and seal the images on their reverse side with some PVA glue.  Again set aside until completely dry.

17.  Finally cut out the felt to seal off the back, tidy it up and protect any surface you are going to display it on.  Use the hot glue gun to stick it to the back of the mirror.

18.  Enjoy placing your new jewellery stand and displaying your pretty items on it!