Happy day! We’re getting closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas which makes me feel joyful. We have so much to be thankful for and an entire season of reminders is a good thing! I posted this image on Instagram last week and mentioned that I made the shade to update the IKEA chandelier.
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There was nothing wrong with the light, I was just ready for a new look for (you guessed it) not a lot of money.. Are you sensing a theme over here? But I feel like this could work for so many out of date lights as a quick, temporary fix so I’ll do my best to give you a tutorial. By that I mean I’ll show you a smaller scale version and some pictures of the actual shade at our dining table and see if you can figure it out from there. This project was your basic ‘guess and check and keep modifying until it doesn’t look stupid’ kind of situation.
Here’s what I used:
Glue gun
Mattress ticking The kind I got from Joann was very thick and stiff, it almost stands by
itself. It’s not a must but I think it makes it easier to work with. The picture is my mini model and the ticking is not stiff like the one I used on my actual light.
1 Embroidery hoop (measure the width of your light and get a hoop slightly bigger) Hobby Lobby had the biggest one I could find at 23″
Wood stain (I use this color for almost every project. It’s a perfect warm brown color.)
Paint Sticks
Quarter round trim pieces
First, cut the fabric to the height and width you need for your light. On the big version, the stripes were horizontal so I was able to use them as a guide to stay straight and cut straight lines. I wanted my light fixture to show a tiny bit from the top and bottom so I made mine 11″ in height and then cut it to the length of the radius of the square circumference of the circle. I had to keep what I first wrote because it makes me laugh. #keepingitreal
Next, I carefully hot glued the fabric to the outside hoop a couple inches at a time, making sure that the fabric stayed straight and didn’t go past the outer edge.
After the first part is done, line up the fabric so that it hangs straight and hot glue the inner hoop to the bottom of the fabric. Sorry for this yellow pic. But not sorry enough to redo it. You’ll be fine. ; )
Once both sides were done, I had to figure out how to hang it.
That’s right. I’m pretty sure I figured it out after the fact. I started with a wire hanger. If you look closely, you can see it wrapped around the top hoop. It goes across to the other side and has another piece of wire that wraps around and attaches it to the chandelier.
That worked but it hung a little crooked so I took some quarter round trim pieces, only because that’s what was in the garage, and set them on top of the chandelier arms and used tiny screws to attach them to the hoop. See the screws? So maybe I could remove the wire at the top but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I told you that the fabric was really stiff, which I thought worked out well for this project but gravity did it’s thing and it started to fall a little. Enter, paint sticks. I trimmed them to the height of the light, stained them and hot glued them into the inside of the fabric, to hold the top hoop up.
It’s been up there around 2 years and works and looks great. If we ever get sick of it, we can remove it with no damage done to the light.
If you have any specific questions I can answer, let me know. I’m sorry I don’t have any progress photos of the actual project but it truly was a guess and check kind of thing. The project probably cost me around $15 so it wouldn’t have even been a big deal if it didn’t work.. What is that, like 2 Starbucks drinks? ; )
Thanks for reading, friends!
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