How I Saved $400

Would you like to know how I just saved myself a whole lotta money?

Of course you do.

Last week my folks, my aunt, and I were in Chicago, and we perused the selection at Room and Board. There is a lot in this store to get excited about, and during this trip I was particularly taken with their selection of pendant lamps. I liked this design in particular:

Now, I know that fixtures like this aren't new. We've got a similar design from Ikea hanging from the ceiling of King Peter's room (it's kind of like this one, except a feminine embroidered design instead of a photograph), and my mom recently put in a large designer drum shade above her dining room table, with matching fixtures in the kitchen. So I am familiar with them. But I was having a lighting crisis in the sunroom, and this particular pendant really struck a chord with me. (We originally wanted to find a small ceiling fan, but didn't have any luck finding one that matched our specifications and stayed within our budget.) This pendant, or one like it, would work well in my new airy-fairy sunroom while providing a pop of color and functionality.

If you know me, you'll know that as soon as I saw the $400+ price tag for these shades, I snorted in a very common, derisive way. I cannot imagine walking into a store like that, seeing a plain drum shade with a neat pattern on it, and forking over a fortune for it.

Wait, do people do this?

Well, my people don't. Instead, we glean ideas and then go home and copy them using cheap, available materials. Duh.

I got straight to work.

I found this nice linen drum shade at a garage sale for $1 (it's 11" in height and 12" in diameter), and I picked up the teal acrylic paint for $1 and the stencil set for $3. (If you want to copy my project, you'll also need a cord kit like this one, as well as a cap for against the ceiling, in order to actually suspend the shade from the ceiling and disguise the wiring. We had both on hand already. I don't know if you can find suspension kits like this at hardware stores. Our local Lowe's did not, but I didn't ask anywhere else.)

You'll also need some basic craft brushes or sponge applicators. I had some small angled brushes on hand that worked great.

When it came to the design itself, I was first looking for a spongey stamp in a floral theme, but I couldn't find any I liked. I am leery of stencils, since they automatically make me think of the precise ceiling borders in Americana themes that my mom would execute in the 80s, but I decided to give this particular sheet a chance. I was still leery when I brought it home, since a) the brand was called "Stencil Mania", and b) the flower designs were a little iffy. In the wrong hands, they could be bad. But I thought perhaps that my hands could do them justice.

First I cut the five different flower designs out, being sure to leave enough plastic on two sides of each stencil so that my painter's tape could actually grip something. On the other sides I trimmed pretty closely, since I knew I'd eventually want to be squeezing in lots of flowers at the same time.

I started stenciling with the largest flower.

One thing you need to accept, if you plan on attempting a similar project, is the beauty of randomness. I am a very rigid, rules-following, line-towing person, and sometimes this is very hard for me to accept. But there is no mathematical formula on Earth that would give me the best possible layout for these flowers, and even if there were, The Professor would need to be on hand to figure it out for me. Random was key here, and I just went with the flow.

The Spirit led me, y'all.

Of all of the sizes, I used the large flower the least amount of times, since I knew I had so many other sizes to fill in the white space. And since I wanted this to look as if it had actually been printed onto my shade by exotic artists, as opposed to stenciled on with cheap acrylic paint, I would occasionally stencil a flower off either edge of the shade, like so:

I don't know why I have the shade on its side for that shot, since that doesn't make sense once you have, you know, WET PAINT on that opposite side. In reality I just carefully flipped the shade on its opposite end to do the off-kilter stenciling. Just beware of the paint. It stays put on linen, you know. True fact.

Once I had a happy number of large flowers, I grabbed the next largest size and did the same thing, again embracing the sweet randomness of the task. I repeated for all five flowers, using the smallest size the most as I attempted to fill in every bit of white space that I could. You could really do this project as busy or as chill as you'd like. I chose busy because I wanted color as opposed to a light linen shade against my already light walls. Plus I wanted the teal paint to really pop. I specifically chose this color as a method of marrying my blue ceiling and bookshelf with my other very green accents.

When I was done stenciling (which took the length of one naptime), my finished product looked like this:

And tonight my husband installed it in my sunroom, and you guys, I am SO VERY PLEASED with the results.

We had to hang it pretty close to the ceiling, since this room has a very short ceiling, but you can still tell, especially from the doorway, that it's a pendant lamp and that we have a cool cord to hang it. We are so cool.

Here it is from as far away as I could get without putting my legs out the window:

And here it is being all functional:

I'm pleased to say that, even when the light is on, you can't really tell that it's just paint unless you stand up next to it and touch it. So my "make it look like one printed object" goal was attained. (I think that a big part of why this worked is because I started out with a high quality shade. The lady I bought it from lived in a super nice neighborhood, and she looked like the sort of person who would pay $400 for a printed pendant, so I think I was lucky enough to score a thick, sturdy shade. But the same results could certainly be attained with another, thinner one from, say, Ikea--I just don't know if a super dark paint color would work in that case.)

So there you have it! That's the story of how I recently saw a $400 item I really liked, scoffed at the pricetag, and then went home and made it a very cheap and beautiful reality.

Now go and do the same. And if you know anyone who has recently spent $400 on a similar shade, please send them my blog post so that they can be ashamed of themselves and vow to make better purchasing decisions in the future.

It's only the right thing to do.