{Post 1,187} Mercury Glass Project (DIY from tutorial)

I usually ignore trendy things.  Intentionally.

My daughter's piano teacher has some mercury glass in her dining room.  I sit by it and stitch while Rachel has her lesson.  I got to where I like it!  After reading a couple tutorials, I decided to give it a try today on some items I was going to put in our garage sale Saturday.  I figured if they didn't turn out, to the GS they go.  

I practiced on a quilted pint-size canning jar.  No, I didn't quilt it.  There was a beveled glass pattern years ago that was called quilted.  I didn't see any stitches myself.

The only good picture I got was of my heart-shaped clear glass candy dish.  Here it is.  I am holding it upside down in the photo.

There are a multitude of tutorials out there.  Here is what I did, and it worked for me.  I used my spray bottle filled with water that I normally keep on my ironing board.  Set it as a fine mist.  Spray the outsides of the item if food or plants will ever be in it.  Since this is a candy dish, that's what I did.  Shake up your Looking Glass spray paint (I got mine at Wal-mart although no one else I read about apparently could find it there).  While the glass is wet, spray light coats of the paint.  Have some paper napkins or towels nearby to break the water bubbles under the coat of paint.  It dries really quickly.  Add more coats if it's not as reflective as you would like.

To make it easy to turn the item being sprayed w/o touching it, I put a 6" (cube-shaped) cardboard box on my craft table with an ice cream bucket lid on it.  I set the item on the lid and used the box to turn the project until it was sprayed all over.

PS:  This is being added later (6/20/13).  Every tutorial I saw except one said to spray the paint on and then the water.  I could not see how the bubbles would appear.  With this spray-the-water-first method, the paint coats the water bubbles.  When you break the bubbles with a paper towel or napkin, the "spots" appear.  Made sense to me, and that's what I did.  Your mileage may vary.  :)