It’s that time of year again! My husband and I have a tradition of creating an unconventional Christmas tree every year. Do you remember our DIY Paint Chip Christmas tree from last year? This year we used mirrors and reclaimed wood to create a futuristic-looking tree. As this decade comes to an end you can say we’ve done a lot of “reflecting”!
With the lights on in the room it’s very plain and reflective, but with the lights off and tree lights on the look changes entirely:
The result is very abstract but perfect for entering the year 2020!
Check out the building process in this video:
Each year I try to incorporate things we have in large quantity of and mirrors happened to be something we had plenty of! The previous owner had left large mirrors in almost every room and even more in the basement.
First we took the mirrors out of the ugly frames and figured out which ones we could cut. Apparently you can’t cut tempered glass mirrors or they will shatter so only about half of what we had could be used. I also found some cheap craft mirrors from Dollar Tree and full length mirrors from Target.
The trickiest part of this tree was building a structure that could sustain the weight of the mirrors. My original idea was way too dangerous and complicated so instead we simplified to different sized mirror boxes inspired by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s “Many Small Cubes” sculpture composed of many floating aluminum cubes stacked on each other.
We used reclaimed wood (also left in the house) to build our own “cubes”, and proceeded to cut each mirror to fit the sides. As my first time cutting any type of glass this was a nerve wracking, but thrilling experience! Using a steel, dry-wheel glass cutter we scored the mirror and snapped off the unwanted pieces.
Next we glued the fitted mirrors to each side of the boxes. Instead of mirror glue we found out regular multipurpose acrylic silicone caulking worked great and didn’t bleed through the mirror backing. I would have loved to also have the entire corner walls covered in mirrors but settled with the long mirrors found from Target.
At this point I’ll admit it was cool but it was nothing like I had pictured. In fact, what I didn’t expect was it to become essentially INVISIBLE! lol Up close the reflections were really neat, but at a glance from farther away you literally could not see it, like I had put some type of invisibility cloak on it.
Thankfully the decorations fixed it.
Mirror mosaics are something I plan to dabble in this year, so I took the leftover mirror pieces and smashed them. Luckily we aren’t superstitious!
The smashed pieces were the perfect size to hot glue to the tree so I made a mirror mosaic garland. Thankfully my high temp hot glue gun can hold the pieces to the mirror without them falling off, but without damaging the mirror underneath.
Lighting was the trick to this tree. The mirrors themselves are beautiful, but the lights reflecting in them is like magic. I had found these awesome colored string lights that actually do light shows to any song you play in the room and mixed them with regular white. I even tried some spot lights and black lights to see what the reflections would do!
With some ornaments and snowflakes hanging from the ceiling it became a winter wonderland. I can officially say this is the first abstract tree we’ve made and unfortunately NONE of the pictures compare to what it actually looks like in person. There were so many different effects, styles, and lighting options I could only capture a few of it’s personalities. No filters, just lighting! Craziest tree yet hands down. Which effect do you like the best?
Although this tree is absolutely nothing like our tree from 2016 it reminds me of it because of the spotlights. Check out how we changed the color of our paper bag tree with the spotlights and colored film!