Chippendale Mirrors

Very nice mirrors Bob.

The grain on the Maple is just gorgeous.

-- Paul M ..............If God wanted us to have fiberglass boats he would have given us fiberglass trees. http://prmdesigns.com/

wow…flaming beauties!

-- Max the "night janitor" at www.hardwoodclocks.com

Both mirrors look really nice. The color contrast as a set would be great in a room. The tiger maple especially stands out.

Really nice pieces. Love to see great looking work on great looking wood.

-- dnick, North Hollywood, Ca.

Mirror Mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest lumberjock of all.

Nice job!

-- John, Colorado's (Wooden Wizard)

Wow, amazing wood on this one. Where do people get this amazing wood? Really nice stuff.

Wow, now that is the 3rd WOW Bob….. Beautiful Work. Since I am a sucker for the Mahoganys you know which one I like… What plans did you use?

-- What we do in life will Echo through Eternity........

Thanks for the nice comments everyone!

Gshepherd, I literally searched the web for period 18th century Chippendale mirrors for sale at various auction houses and galleries and picked the scrollwork design that I liked the best. I copied the photo into Photoshop and did some simple mods to generate a suitable outline for scrolling. The rest was easy—just a question of making the frames (like I indicated, there were 2 different approaches used for the two), and then attaching the scrollwork.

ShaneA, the big leaf and curly maple for the first mirror project actually came from two eBay suppliers (lewoh in Ohio, and woodbay in Washington state). I also have a stock of big leaf that I shipped from Tacoma, WA when I visited my brother in law out there—wish I had shipped a ton more! The figured African mahogany came from Exotic Lumber (exoticlumberinc.com), a local supplier here in Maryland (he also ships anywhere).

-- Bob, Potomac, MD

Fantastic job Bob they both look fantastic.

-- W James Brokenbourgh Custom furniture maker http://artisticwoodstudio.com/

Beautiful ! I think the lighter colored woods are actually better (than the versions of this type of mirror using woods like Walnut or mahogany).

-- Dwight - "Free legal advice available - contact Dewey, Cheetam & Howe""

Spectacular wood choices, both are beautiful. Those scroll work details look crisp from here. Just really nice work. Thanks for sharing with us.

-- Nikki in Virginia

Beautiful piece, the grain on both mirrors is striking.

-- Paul--- Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. — Scott Adams

They are true beauties. The first one looks more like quilted rather than tiger maple which I like almost above all other wood. I sure would hang either on my wall!

-- Paul - The sweetest sound in my shop, next to Mozart, is what a hand plane makes slicing a ribbon.

Hi Bob, Where did you get the design? Did you draw them yourself?

Hi Bob! I actually got the design idea from an 18th century mirror that I found on the Internet. I’ve added 3 more pictures—#4 is of the original 18th century mirror (note the string inlay which I decided not to incorporate in my versions), and #5 and #6 are of the templates that I used for the top and bottom crests.

I popped the original image of the mirror into Photoshop, contrast stretched and converted to B&W. I then used Microsoft Powerpoint to take the resulting bit maps, scale them to the dimensions that I wanted, and flipped and connected the mirror images to use as paper templates for my scroll saw. (Could have also done that in Photoshop, but Powerpoint is actually a bit simpler to use for such simple operations.) Lumberjocks only lets you post 6 images, so I have not shown the side pieces, but they were done in the same manner.

My frame is slightly wider than on the original, but I chose the width based upon measurements that I took on two other Chippendale mirrors whose proportions I liked better.

-- Bob, Potomac, MD