Goldfish Mirror

I love this mirror. It's so pretty. A little rough around the edges, but still beautiful. It's too bad I gave it away. I almost want to make another, but I won't. You'll see why if you continue to read down below, which is the original post from my old blog that was posted on March 20, 2009.

 

"Here it is finally. The bane of my existence that took a month to complete. I spent hours each evening (not every evening but a lot of evenings) getting this thing put together. It looks great, but it was a big learning process.

Now to how I made this thing. First I went online and found a coloring book picture of goldfish. I messed around with the size and arrangement and then put them into a paint.net file. I also put a square into that file where I thought the mirror part of the mirror would go. (It is an IKEA Malma Mirror with a small three by three mirror in a 10 by 10 wood frame.) Next I drew wavy water plants on a paper, scanned it into my computer and added it to the paint file. Then I colored the picture I had created.

After I had my goldfish picture complete I took the file and uploaded it into my cross stitch creation program "PCStitch Pro 9." It is an awesome program that lets you turn pictures into cross stitch patterns. Anyway, once I had the pattern made all I had to do was put the picture together in wait for it. . . beads. So I bought a bead loom and seed beads in the colors I wanted and began the tedious process of weaving together the picture. For the most part I did this in 10 bead wide strips. Here is where I met my first problem. My pattern was based in size on stitches not beads so the first strip ended up being too long. Not a big deal, I adjusted and went on accordingly. However, when I got to the part where the mirror interrupted the strips the adjustment made them too short. I eventually got this all worked out after I had the picture assembled in beads. Also the colors I had chosen for the goldfish ended up being wider beads than that for the plants and ocean so parts of the strips were wider in other parts. This made for some tricky construction later on. Also, did I mention this process was tedious. It took forever. I was so sick of it by the time I was done. Anyway, once I had everything beaded I used Modge Podge and glued it down to the wood mirror frame which I first painted an aqua color. The gluing was tricky as this was when I needed to make adjustments and if the beads somehow did not get securely glued down on the edges when I trimmed the strings beads fell off. However, my husband and I fixed it up as best we could and it ended up looking great.

Once it was finished, I boxed it up (packing it in Styrofoam peanuts, tissue paper, and bubble wrap) and shipped it off to my swap partner. Yes this was for a swap through Craftster. It was supposed to be a simpler swap, but you know me. I have to make everything more difficult and blow it out of proportion. I only hope my partner loves the mirror."