Faux Mirror Tutorial

My sister, Mashaide, found this image on Pinterest and wanted to create something like it for her photo booth.  Since my family LOVES Halloween, I have a very full Halloween Pinterest board and I remembered seeing tombstones and other Halloween decor made from insulation foam board.  (BTW these people are awesome at Halloween!)  After brainstorming we thought, "Why not create our own faux mirror using insulation foam board?"

I had this picture frame from Hobby Lobby and I knew it would be perfect for this project, so it became our template.

We found some insulation foam board at our local building supply store.

It measures about 8' x 4' x 1' and you can find it at Lowe's or Home Depot also.  It looks like this and will fit in a mini-van or suburban. :)

source: homedepot.com

We thought we could just draw the picture frame onto our foam board and cut it out, but after trying, we realized it was harder then we thought.  Ugh!  My husband came up with the ingenious idea to use a projector so all we had to do was trace the photo of the picture frame.

We took the above picture of the frame and projected it onto the foam board and, let me tell you, it was a lot faster then drawing it "free hand".  Thanks husband for saving the day, or maybe just a million hours!

When we were tracing, we thought that was the hard part, but little did we know that cutting was going to be even more fun (insert sarcasm here). 

Before you start cutting foam board you should really buy something like this or something similar because it's the best way to cut foam board.

source: http://hotwirefoamfactory.com/

I live in a small town, so this type of thing is not readily available. While my sister waited to receive a similar kit in the mail, we used kitchen knives and a Dremmel 1500 VersaTip tool. It's the best we could find last minute and in such a small town. Let me tell you, cutting without a heated knife is a HUGE pink mess which your husband won't be happy about if you're making this in the kitchen!

This is what it looked like after tracing and cutting it out. As you can see, we stopped tracing the detail in the middle because we figured it was just little rectangles repeated and that could just be done by hand with the heated knife.

My sister, Mashaide took it home at this point and did the remainder of the cutting out of the design.  This is what it looked like when she was in the process of cutting the design.

In the center she had to do a little patching because she melted a little to far into the foam board, but we figured paint would cover that up.

This is in the process of painting.

We learned a lot from this project and it took a lot of time, but we LOVED the end result!

If you want to see more pictures from the party where we used this faux mirror, click here.