Light & Letters

Before I throw a couple of Christmas projects (I know, just in time forrrr…next Christmas) to the blog post mix, I thought I’d sprinkle in a few projects I quickly did in the girls’ room a couple of months ago.  You can see the full reveal and stencil tutorial in my last post, if you missed it.

Let’s talk about the fan shade first.

You might remember back when I whipped up an eerily similar one for the fan in our master bedroom a few years ago?

Well, you might also remember I kinda hated it.  It looked really homemade and I try to sway from that look when I’m creating decor in most cases.  So, down it came.  Using the same idea and steps, I grabbed the fabric from JoAnn Fabrics (can’t find it online!) and used some of the extra plastic I had on hand from making this shade to create the same thing, only much less wonky.

To install it, my plan was to have Anthony cut off all of the inside, metal rods except for a couple of inches on the small shade and only the middle ring part of the large shade.  The ring on the large shade was too thick for this fan – it would sit on top of the bulb and screw into the light bulb base just fine but not far enough to get electricity going to turn the light on.  Major problem.  So, I had him cut off the old ring and my plan was to put a large washer in its place, a similar idea to what Young House Love did here.  Except while he was cutting, he accidently broke off the rods from where they were attached to the ring.  Turns out they were really poorly attached to the ring and just broke off without much tinkering.  :( 

I cried inside but forged ahead in making the light fixture.  After the shade was made and recovered, I hot glued the rods back onto the large top ring.  Then I glued the ends of the rods to the rod pieces still on the small shade.  So far, it’s stayed.  To hang the entire thing, I grabbed some outdoor chain I had laying around and slipped one end over the rods on the small shade and the other ends I slipped through the holes on the actual fan that are reserved for the screws that hold on the original light kit.  I should take more pictures to explain that a little better but for hopefully for now it makes sense somewhat.

Here’s what it looks like from underneath:

It’s still needs some tweaking because its a little crooked still, but one of these days I’ll figure out a new solution.  I love it though.

And I love the fabric so much that I made a couple of matching pillow shams out of it to adorn the girls’ beds.  They were a trial run so I don’t have a tutorial on those yet but they turned out pretty good so I will definitely let you in on the know-how to those in the future!

And quick let’s just pop over to the stenciled wall and talk about those big monograms.

I’ll be honest.  The idea of them looked better in my head.  I’m not sure if that wall just needs a little more color or if I need to re-paint a fancier ampersand onto the mirror but something needs something.

The letters themselves are these paper mache letters from JoAnn Fabrics.  The quality is great and if you can grab them either on sale or with a coupon, you can get them down to almost $5 a piece.  The only thing that bothers me a little is that the ‘S’ is a little thicker than the ‘C’ so it almost looks like they’re two different fonts.  Maybe that’s what bothering me about this wall…don’t know.

They come in a tan color so I just primed and spray painted them my favorite gold (Rust-Oleum's Metallic Gold*).

I used velcro Command strips to hang them on the wall just like I hung these paper mache letters in our entry.

Like I mentioned above, I just painted the ampersand on the mirror with some gold and mint acrylic paint.  I love painting on glass and mirrors because, if you make a mistake or you don’t like it, you can just windex it off and start over!  I redid this one about fifteen times I think.  :)

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I finally finished our stockings and hung them on the mantel with care!  I’m really excited to show them to you and show you how you can make your very own!  Check out Instagram for a sneak peek!

Have a great weekend…we’re almost there!

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