A wedding dance floor center piece made for a friend for around £22 ($32).

A good friend is getting married in the summer, so I offered up my skills as a maker to give their wedding a unique dance floor center piece in the form of a giant heart shaped disco ball!

Step 1: All You Need Is Love and Some Stuff

Things I used...

Giant inflatable heart - eBay (£12)
PVA glue
Junk mail magazines
Old CD's
Badman scissors
Hot melt glue gun and A LOT of glue sticks (around £10)

Although this project is low on cost I'll warn you that it's quite heavy on time. The good news is you can do most of it either in bed or watching TV so it's a good project to casually work on in the evenings.

Step 2: Total Eclipse of the Heart Using Papier-Mâché

I picked up my inflatable heart from eBay for around £12 (including postage) and it was the biggest one I could find at around 70cm across.

The first step was to give the inflatable heart a hard shell using papier-mâché.

I cut some junk mail magazines into strips and watered down some PVA glue to use as paste. There's probably a better way to do it but that is what I had to hand.

I hung the heart from the ceiling and gave it around 4 layers of paper over the course of a weekend.

Step 3: I Would Do Anything for Love, Including Sacrificing My CD Collection.

For the mirror bits I used my old CD collection. An important step for keeping the cost low on this project is accepting that CD's are a dead format. I know it's sad, but they'd been sitting in the roof for a good decade so it was time to put them to good use.

CD's aren't the easiest of things to cut cleanly so I boiled a pan of water and dipped them in the hot water to soften them before cutting. After first cutting them into strips, I cut them into squares, getting around 20 squares out of each CD.

It took around 7000 squares to cover the whole heart.

Step 4: I Got Glue Babe

Now for the bit that will really test your patience!

No real secret or trick to this, just methodically gluing thousands of mirror bits to the heart using hot melt glue.

Just keep scissors to hand to trim bits to fit nicely together and don't try to do too much in one sitting or you'll go mad.

Step 5: Hanging Mount

After a while the plastic hanging bit of the inflatable heart started to tear under the weight.

To strengthen it I took a couple of corner brackets and trimmed them to fit the exposed bit. Then drilled a couple of extra holes for bolts and sandwiched the plastic between them with super glue. This was probably overkill though and you could do it with some stiff plastic instead.

Then I grabbed a hanging spinner (I already had a few spare but you should be able to get one for around £8), lit it up with a spot light, and there you have it!

Step 6: If You'd Rather Just Borrow Mine...

Considering how much work I put into this it seems shame to only use it once. So if you're willing to come pick it up and drop it off I might let you borrow it in return for some leftover food and booze from your wedding! I live in Bristol...Get in touch!

Runner Up in the
Valentine's Day Challenge 2016

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11 Comments

KimberlyStoney

7 years ago

It looks great- brilliant project ! Love the tip about warming the plastic in hot water.

SirRahKnight

7 years ago

I love the old cd tips, I had not thought about putting them in boiling water to soften them. We may disagree about CDs being a dead format, but I have enough coasters around to make a wonderful start. I just figured out how to weld 6 mill plastic airtight and make any sized shape desired, this project gave me some wonderful ideas! Thanks!

ashleyjlong

7 years ago

Very cool! Now, are those regular scissors or some kind of wire nippers? The blade looks a bit curved in the photo and I bet something made for dealing with metal might cut well after the softening. You got a vote from me for having a super unique project!