Turn Your Old CDs into Art

Inspired by a Facebook post of artwork made using pieces of CD’s to decorate different objects, Tim and I decided to put a bag full of old CD’s to good use.  Our idea was to give a boring mirror unit a makeover using CD pieces in a mosaic design.  This was back in 2015, and was my New Thing A Day challenge for the day. 

We set about stripping apart the mirror unit down to just the wooden frame, which we painted in acrylic paint.  

As that was drying, we began cutting up the old CD’s.  Interestingly, we discovered that re-recordable CD’s and DVD’s were much easier to work with than sturdier, official CD albums. 

Cutting up the CD’s was easy enough but then having to separate the thin metal layer from the plastic was tricky and very time consuming.  The plastic pieces were discarded, and the metal pieces to be used in our project were placed on a tray.



Once the painted wood frame had fully dried, it was time to start gluing on the pieces of CDs in a mosaic pattern. We used super glue and tweezers to do this.

This project was painstakingly slow, and took four hours in total from start to finish.  I was sick to death of it after the first two hours, but once I start a project I like to see it through… and so persevered.

Tim is a true perfectionist and the bits he worked on looked about a hundred times better than the areas I did, so we combined our efforts.  Tim cut and placed the CD pieces, and I glued them down…

With all of the mosaic completed, the mirror was put back in place.  The completed project really did look very pretty on two sides.  The one side that I had been working on initially did not look quite so amazing, however ha ha!

One of our friends fell in love with the finished piece and asked us to give it to her, so we did.  It has been lovingly displayed in her home ever since!

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