Learn how to further protect your mirror from tarnishing

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today we're going to be working with Vinyl Mask to make some really unique mirrored glass art. Now, when I started working with vinyl, I felt pretty intimidated. I thought that it was going to be a very complex process and I really prepared myself for the worst, but I've got to say I was pretty surprised at how straightforward it is and also how impressive the result is. So hopefully that's what you'll find as well. Now, like I said, we're going to be working with a vinyl mask and then also making a silver mirror. So I've got here my silvering supplies, and we'll talk about all of those in a minute. But let's first discuss the supplies that you need for the actual vinyl application part. Now I have one of those desktop cutters that cuts vinyl.
I really recommend it if you're going to be doing this on a somewhat regular basis that you purchase one of those. They're pretty inexpensive and it really enables you to get very precise, very clean lines, but you can certainly still work with vinyl by doing a freehand drawing and cutting it out. We have complete instructions for that on our website, and if that's something you'd like to see a video about, just let us know. We're always interested in new video options, but like I said, for today, I just use my vinyl cutter and I've got that vinyl mask here. You can see I've already applied my transfer tape, so I've got this here. I've got my squeegee, I've got plastic tongs. I find these are really helpful, especially on a pretty detailed design to go in and weeded it out. And my cutter actually came with a really nice weeding tool, but I have found that a paperclip bent works just as well and it's nice and easy, compact to hold in your hand.
And then of course, last but certainly not least, we've got our glass. Now this is our glass. You can see it's a rectangular piece and you've probably already noticed that I'm already wearing my gloves, and that is because cleanliness, just like in any mirroring process is very important. But especially in this process because we're limited later on in terms of how deeply we can clean our piece and we know if our glass isn't well cleaned, then our silver mirror isn't necessarily going to turn out the way we want. So what I've done is I went ahead and cleaned this glass exactly like I do in the mirroring process. I definitely recommend that you head over to our cleaning video and see it's a little bit more involved than you might think, and it's one of the key predictors to success in mirroring. So I went ahead and cleaned it.
I did dry it very thoroughly, and I've got it resting here on a nice clean cloth until I'm ready for it. Now, like I said, I've got my vinyl mask with my transfer tape. Now this next step or this first step really is one of the most important, and that's going to be positioning my vinyl. So let's bring our glass right over here and I am going to peel off the backing to my vinyl. But you know what, before I do that, let me make sure that my transfer tape is very well secured on there. I don't want it to lift off any of my vinyl when I transfer. I found you can't really do this step enough. Always can perfect it a little bit more. Okay, that looks good. So I'm going to take the backing off and now I can see my design and pulling my glass over here, and you want to make sure that you do your best to line it up because you can't really reposition it. It's pretty difficult. I

Have
Not been successful with that myself,

So just take your

Time to see that it's lined up well.

I think

We're good there. Okay, now take my squeegee and really push it down. Paying close attention to those areas of the design. I can see the design here through my transfer tape. Remember, what we're doing in this vinyl mask application is we're blocking off areas of the glass that we do not want to have silvered. As we know, the silvering chemicals of course, are liquid based, and so they're going to go where they're going to go and we want the vinyl mask to stop them in a very particular artistic way. Okay, so now I can go ahead and lift off my transfer tape. 
Once again, do this part carefully and watch as you go to make sure that it's not lifting off your vinyl. If it is, you just push it back down, push your vinyl and try again. You can see I've removed my paper once again. I'm going to push down the vinyl and here's decision time. Now I have obviously a design cutout here and I need to decide what area I want to silver and what area I want to have remain clear. Now you have to think about how you want your finished piece to look and then work your way backwards. So for example, I've got some lettering here and this is the area where I want a silver. So what that means is that if I want it to be silver, that's the area I would then weeded out now. So basically you take the tip here of your paperclip and push into it just a bit. Once again, I've got gloved hands, and that's because I'm going to start exposing that glass and I want to make sure that it doesn't get any of the oils from my hands or any other kind of contamination on it because I want that glass to remain as clean as possible. 
Okay, once I've got it picked up a little bit there, I'm going to use my tweezers, pull it, and you can see it lifts off really nicely. Once again, if you see any areas that are picking up in a way that you do not want them to release the vinyl, go back with your squeegee and really push it down. I'm going to keep going here with my design, weeding out the areas that I want to have silvered. Okay, so this is my last piece. I've got my design fully out. You can see it taking shape now. And my next step is to do the cleaning. Now we want to make sure that we're gentle in this cleaning one. We've already done a pass of cleaning it, and so it should be in pretty good shape, but we want to make sure if there's any glue residue from the masking that that's removed, but you want to do it gently.
So just use your sponge, follow the cleaning instructions like we have on our website. I wouldn't use any serum oxide at this point. I would just use the gentle sponge with either the cleaning liquid or the cleaning powder. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. Get us ready for mirroring. And then when we come back, we'll talk all about how to silver over this vinyl mask. We are now ready to do the mirroring part of our vinyl mask project. I've got my piece nicely cleaned here. I'm using my bench kit. I have my pump spray bottle for my water. I've opted to use the pouring silver chemicals. This whole process can be done with spray silver as well. If you'd like. I've got my tin for silver already measured out. And there's one key component here, which you might not typically see with glass mirroring, and that is wetting agent.
Now, I discovered this kind of by accident. It's really useful to use though because typically when you're working with glass, as long as you've got it really well cleaned, you'll see the water just sheets off of it without a problem. Well, that's not going to be the case with the vinyl mask. It's what we call hydrophobic. So when we use the wet agent, you'll see it creates a really even flowed surface over the full piece, and it allows the chemicals to evenly sit and not pull up in certain areas. So although I've got this cleaned, I do need to do my final rinse with my distilled water. Of course, from here on it's only going to be distilled water. And anytime you've got this kind of design where there's the intricate cutout, like these ladders, you want to make sure that you take some time and really focus on rinsing out. Those letters tend to hold on to whatever's on their surface, so really rinse those out well. 
Okay, and then next up is the wedding agent. So what you're going to do is you're going to spray it over the glass surface. Really make sure you get it. Good coverage. My vinyl is white here. So basically what I'm trying to do is cover any of the white areas. That looks pretty good. I think that I've got it where it's flowing really evenly over the surface. That looks good. Now onto my tin for silver. Now of course, just like anytime I'm mirroring, I've got my secondhand here, and I won't go in detail about the full mirroring process because you've seen that in other videos. If you have any questions about it, certainly let us know. But let's go ahead and get started with our tin.
And there we have it nicely rinsed off, and as I turn it over, you can really see just how impressive the effect is because what you see is that I've got a beautifully silver design within a clear glass background. Anything that shows white now would be completely clear glass. So in terms of next steps, I have a lot of different options. I could tilt this to dry it, paint the backing paint over the back, doing that while the vinyl mask is still on, allow the paint to dry and then pull off the mask. I could antique it, I could paint it, and then do another type of mirroring behind it. I've done a couple examples here to show you. Now you can see with this piece, I went ahead and silvered it in the same way I did with this one. I silvered the letters and then I painted those over the back, lifted the vinyl mask, and then I painted the background with a red paint. 
And so that gives me a really nice three toned effect. And on this piece, I've been working with my antiquing compounds. Now, this is the reverse of this image, right? Because we've got silver letters here, and in this one I have clear letters. I went ahead and silvered the piece, and then I antiqued it. And I just started peeling up the vinyl mask here so you could really see how that could look. And then if I wanted to, I could silver over this, and then I'd have areas of bright silver with an antique silver design as well. So as you can see, there's a lot of different options. Once you get the basics down, let your imagination go wild. It's a lot of fun. I really hope you give this a try. And if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the comment box below. If you found this helpful, be sure to give it a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe to our channel to be notified of all of our future videos. Thanks for stopping by.