DIY Light Cover

I bartered with my mom to get creative rights over the smallest bathroom.  My argument was, "It's a tiny space how bad could I possibly botch it?"  And so my insanity began.

I will definitely blog at some point about the overall project, but today is one specific area in general- a really ugly in-ceiling light. 

Upstairs in the house I had seen a big roll of chicken wire.  My brain being the strange string of neurons that it is immediately thought about repurposing it into the gridwork for a faux chandelier cover for the ugly built in light.

What, you mean not everyone's brain works that way? 

So I started stringing beads, beads, and MORE beads.  This time in a stroke of thinking ahead I used silver wire to string the beads on so that I could not only do longer strands easier but so that I also stood less chance of it breaking.

I don't always have the best luck with cords you see.

So I used a combination of round clear beads in 4 different sizes, diamond shaped beads, and some enlongated white seed beads.

I did as few of strands of the seed beads as possible because lets face it they are incredibly time consuming.

I had to rig up a pretty neato system in order to make life easier on myself. 

Sidenote, yes that IS a pokeball in the background that I now use to store my beads and whatnots.  Don't judge, I am a sucker for upcycling...

And pokemon.

So as you can see I started to develop this type of design working from the outside corners in, draping multiple lengths of strands and then going back and filling in with little diamond beads here and there. 

And soon we started to get something that looked a little more like this.

Now, I would like to go ahead and say that if I had this to do over again (which I will as I think we are going to make one for the larger bathroom as well) I would paint the chicken wire white.  If you get really tired of beading and think you have enough you really probably don't and will still be able to see it.  White would have made it blend in better with the light from the CFL bulb, and probably would have saved me a lot of extra work.

However, since I seem to enjoy costing myself a lot of extra work, I am going to be making extra strands to drop from it that are on lobster clasps so that I can easily attach them.

And I still might paint some of the grid white.  Just because I can.

Now here is the cover attached to the light.  Forgive the lackluster picture quality, my iPhone did not feel like giving me anything better. 

You can see here that the grid is clearly visible, hence you need to paint yours white.  I also need to paint the sides of the light fixtures themselves which might have been better to do upfront.

But like I said, I like to b difficult.

Next up for this light is finding some non-twine chains for pulls and getting rid of the stupid yellow ones.  I also want to add a few more jewels or paint it white, paint the fixture, and call it a day!

All in all, for some chicken wire I found and some beads I already had, I think it is pretty fantastic.

Oh, and I attached it with earring hooks! Pin It Now!