Pinterest Challenge

The other day when I saw Katie and Sherry blog about the Pinterest Challenge I did a little happy dance in my chair! I love pinterest, I love a good challenge and I love, love, love making things. A match made in heaven!

Anyway, I searched back through my Pinterest boards and decided to make a star chandy light fixture for the bare bulb in Max's room.

Only I decided to take things one step further and make it a little more challenging. I decided that I wanted to do it for free, using only things that I had lying around the house.

Here's how it turned out!

I think I'm in love :)

Now if you're interested in the 'how to', the next 5 billion words and photographs will give you a run down. If not, skip to the end to get a sneak peak of the rest of Max's room.

How to DIY a star chandy for free:

First up I went searching through the dump that I call my garage looking for something that would work as the starting point for the project. I was actually looking for wire of some description, but when I spotted the cover for an old, broken pedestal fan I knew I had a winner. Not only was it free, it was also upcycling something old and broken into something new and beautiful. Win win!

I tried a few different methods for breaking through the spokes on the fan guard. Scissors, my mini handsaw and a combination of both. I wasn't having much luck though. Sean came along and suggested we give it a go with pair of pliers. Success!

It took about an hour, but eventually I had worked the cover back to a single wire circle.

Next up I grabbed a few different strands of ribbon that I had in my craft stash and wound the ribbon around the frame, hot gluing it every couple of inches.

It wasn't the neatest job, but I figured it would end up being covered by stars anyway.

The cutting out of the stars was by far the most time consuming thing of all. I didn't want to spend money buying a punch, so I printed out a star shape onto cardboard and then traced around it onto craft paper. Again I raided my stash for the different papers that I used. All up I ended up cutting out 133 stars. Yikes!

To get the nice strings of stars I used my poor mistreated sewing machine - it has sewn more paper crafts that any machine probably should! It was really simple though, I even managed to thread the bobbin without referring to the instruction manual! Another first!

Once I had fourteen strings of stars (7 with 9 stars, and 7 with 10 stars), I laid them out around the frame to get my spacing right. I also used paperclips, rubber bands, clips etc to bunch the stars up so that they were easier to work with.

Originally I was planning on tying the strings to the frame, but it was so fiddly that I gave up on that idea and hot glued the top star from each string to the frame. I used a cake stand and platter to elevate it up so that the stars didn't get bent.

Then I added some string to the top so that it could be hung from the ceiling.

Standing on a chair I can't quite reach the ceiling, so Sean stuck up some hooks for me and then hung the mobile/chandy.  As soon as it was up there I knew I loved it. After 6 hours of work it was definitely a relief to have it done!

 

Have you ever been inspired to make something that you've pinned?