Rustic Sunburst Mirror DIY

Happy Monday! I hope you had a wonderful Easter Sunday. Our day started off a little chilly but it warmed up nicely. The day was gorgeous without a cloud in sight and with gentle wind. We spent half the day outdoors as my kids could not get enough of the beautiful weather.

I am not sure you recall, but I have a fun series on my channel called the Look for Less Challenge and it’s an open invitation to anyone who wishes to participate. Basically I ask you to find a home decor item that you love but is out of your price range,  and recreate it for less. Like this Pottery Barn mirror dupe I shared previously.

Well, I decided to tackle another mirror in my latest challenge and I think this one is even better than the first.

For a while now I have been wanting a sunburst mirror, but most are not my style and are overpriced. I did a recent search of rustic sunburst mirrors and there are several options out there now.  They’re still out of my price range, so I decided to finally tackle it on my own.

I went to my local Home Depot and came up with an inexpensive idea.

Here are the supplies I used:

*the links below are affiliate links for your convenience, more information here*

• Wood Shims (16 packs of 12 shims each)
• Wood Glue 
• Clamps 
• Embroidery Hoop 8″
• Round Mirror 
• Wire Hanging Kit

 

How to make…

Rustic Sunburst Mirror DIY

Heads up! This tutorial is actually a little complicated and quite repetitive. So, I am sharing a couple of up close pictures of one of the 16 sunburst “flares” (I think that it what you would call them ??‍♀️) and the rest of the tutorial is in the video below. It will show you exactly how much wood glue I used and exactly how I put all of them together.

I also show different methods of holding the shims together that might work for you depending on what you have available in terms of supplies.

Each pack of shims comes with 12 shims. You will use all of them in a pack but you will first take out 3 and glue them together like this:

Make sure to use a good amount of wood glue and clamp them together for several hours before removing.

Next you will take the next 8 shims and glue 2 sets of 4 of them together like shown below.

 

After those are glued together you will glue them all together like shown below.

***Please note, that because of the shape and size of the “flare” you will NOT be able to glue them all at once and hold them down with clamps, so please make sure to go by these steps and glue them in the 4,3,4 groupings first and then the entire piece together like below. 

After you make one of these, make 15 more of them and you will notice you will use 11 shims for this “flare” but you must keep the 12th shim because you will need those for the final assembly.

Okay, now for the rest of the tutorial, I suggest you watch the video as I will show you exactly how to put it together and how to reinforce and eventually hang the piece on your wall.

This is a large and heavy piece and I want to make sure you don’t miss a detail…

I hope you like this as much as I do! It couldn’t have turned out more amazing!

 

I preferred to leave mine rustic and not paint or stain it, but you can do so depending on your preference.

 

Don’t forget to pin!