i've messed around with wiring a grand total of once in my life: in seventh grade, my invention fair group tried to build circular track lighting (shut up, we were twelve) and managed to knock out half of the outlets at one poor kid's house. we might also have thrown said track lighting in his pool when it threatened to catch on fire, but my memory could be embroidering a bit. let's say that it is.
on the other hand, i've been electrocuted many times - most recently when my curling iron crapped out in college and i decided to bite the cord while the darn thing was still plugged into the wall (shut up, i was, er, eighteen). that was certainly my fault, but i also seem to have spectacularly bad luck where outlets and wires and things that go zzzt are concerned. given all that, i'm especially proud of the fact that i totally made a chandelier last night.
it's a project jean pelle designed for readymade this spring; i missed it at the time, probably because all of our magazines bit the dust in the vast hemorrhaging of stuff that was march's bed bug adventure, but i leapt to attention when it came up in jean's sneak peek at design*sponge this monday. joe and i are fixated on the idea of a chandelier in our bathroom, and this one fits the brief perfectly: it's a bit nautical, a bit industrial, and quite playful. our bathroom-to-be needs to take itself less seriously: there's marble, and then there's marble. i promptly ordered a dozen small bubble balls ($2 each) and three porcelain sockets ($5 each) online, hunted down plastic rods at lee's up the street, and got everything else at the hardware store. i had all of my materials by yesterday morning, ran them home on my lunch break, and settled in to throw it all together yesterday evening.
in hindsight, i should've bought a few spare bubble balls. i broke one as i was wiping its label-goo away with a cotton ball and some nail polish remover; i broke two more (they're fragile little guys) when my first attempt at wire-wrapping wasn't emphatic enough and the whole chandelier crashed in my lap. i also could have kept an eye out for white electrical tape (mine was black), as it wouldn't have been as visible beneath the cotton parcel-post string.
that said, this is the best kind of project: its materials are common and inexpensive, it doesn't require special skills (if you can make a simple braid, you've got all the background you need) or obscure tools (i bought a $9 wire stripper, but i probably could have made do with a utility knife in a pinch), and it's a great introduction to a traditionally intimidating branch of DIY. i can't tell you how proud i was when i put on my rubber wellies, plugged in the extension cord, and saw the whole thing light up. i made a motherfucking chandelier last night!
YOU MADE A CHANDELIER!!! Here's to looking up :).
ReplyDeleteit looks amazing! can't wait to see it in the Marble bathroom! i've always wondered what people do with the balls at CB2, other than put them in decorative jars & bowls...
ReplyDeletei probably should have actually gone down to cb2 and bought the balls there rather than online - shipping was like $9 - but i rationalized that they might not stock them in-store, or they might not have the full dozen i needed. in my defense, we thought we were moving two days later and i planned at the time on leaving everything at my office when it arrived...
ReplyDeletei bet not-too-christmastatic tree ornaments, nimbly disassembled, could work for this, too - now that i know how easily they break, i feel like i could do a better job of working with them. son of bubble chandelier?
It looks great! The closest I have ever come to making a chandelier is stringing up some Christmas lights.
ReplyDeletei am seriously impressed.
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