For the Love of Spoons

Have you ever played the card game spoons? It's fun.

But that's not what this post is about.

My pinterest account is only a few months old (I'm a late bloomer, what can I say), but way back when I first browsed the diy posts, this caught my eye:

Chrysanthemum Mirror

Either I didn't get Pinterest at the time, or I doubted I would use it much, because I did not re-pin this, I bookmarked it. Either way, I was able to find my way back to the site about a month ago, when I decided it was just the thing to hang on the wall behind the rocking chair in the nursery closet.

Kristi at Addicted to Decorating cut the handles off a ton of plastic spoons, hot glued them to a wreath form and then painted the spoons, mixing white with the teal as she got to the outer edges to create an hombre chrysanthemum looking mirror!

Well, as I've mentioned before I had my choice of retailers: Wal-Mart or the Dollar Tree. The wreath forms were only to be found at Wal-Mart and they were close to $10. I'm not cheap, I'm super-duper cheap. I ignored the wreath frame and went to Dollar Tree and bought a big foam poster board, and also 6 packages of white plastic spoons (Yes, I compared prices and they were cheaper at the Dollar Tree by almost $.40).

I didn't take any pictures of the process, since I never planned on blogging about anything ever, but I followed all the directions from Kristi's tutorial except for using a foam poster board and a traced outline of a bowl to create a circle (and it ended up semi-wonky, to match the chevron wall). I picked a pink hombre color scheme and was able to use up some of my leftover fuscia acrylic paint from painting the rocking chair cushions adding white latex paint that I had used on the baseboards in the room.

A few things:
 I tried many different ways of cutting the handles off the spoons and never found a fail-proof way to keep the spoon from splintering. I set aside the prettiest for the front row, and used a little bit of sandpaper to smooth them out. But I wasn't really sweating it since I had just cut through a thousand spoons and was ready to move on.

 Painting it took forever and a day. Possibly because I was using a super cheap brush from a watercolor set I bought at the dollar tree that fell apart by the end.

 I cut the inner circle too big. The mirror I bought at the Dollar Tree was too small. So I improvised by using it as a frame. And when I have the time, I will make something much cooler to frame, but I was tired and just needed something to put behind the spoons.

If you don't look too close, it looks great!