Chicken Wire Pendant Lights.
For the last day of Chicken Wire Week I present…this beautiful chicken wire pendant light. I love how rustic it is but also very clean and industrial. My house isn’t hardwired for pendant lights so this is the kind that hang from a swag hook in the ceiling and the cord goes down the wall to an outlet.
But like I mentioned in one for my first posts, for every success there is usually a fail. This project falls partially between those two, success and fail. The fail seems to come from materials more so than the process.
First we will talk about how I made it, then we will go into what went wrong, and finally we will talk about how to fix it.
Lighting has never been my strong suit….none of my lamps match, none of the bulbs are the same color (why do they make light bulbs with color?), and I can’t stand overhead lighting, but without it everything is so dark. So you see when it comes to lighting I’m hopeless. This is my first attempt to rehabilitate myself.
So here is what you will need for this fun light.
- Chicken Wire (of course).
- Embroidery hoops (as you can tell I enjoy these a lot) two of the same size, these are 12 inch hoops.
- Lose wire; to attache the chicken wire to the hoops.
- A hanging socket kit.
- Light Hanging Chain.
- Swag Hook.
- Wire Cutters.
- Needle Nose Pliers.
Directions:
- Just like for the Cloche and and the Cake Carrier you will start by figuring out the circumference of your hoops. I knew I was using a 12 inch hoop so the circumference was 44 inches (The Hubs helped me with the math).
- We measured that length of chicken wire and left about and extra inch.
- Cut where the wires twist together.
- Once you have you circumference of the lamp cut from the roll of chicken wire, figure out how tall you want your lamp to be. Mine was about a foot.
- Cut the piece of wire down to the right height.
- Rough fit your embroidery hoops to the top and bottom of the piece of chicken wire. You can have your embroidery hoops on the outside or on the inside. I chose the outside.
- Once the chicken wire is how you like it secure the sides together to make a tube.
- Then attach the embroidery hoops to the top and bottom of the tube, by wrapping the loose wire around the hop several times.
- Using the same loose wire create an X across the top.
- Thread the cord of your light socket through the hanging chain. Remember you want the chain to hold the weight of the lamp not the light cord.
- Measure the length of the chain from the ceiling so your light doesn’t hang to low or to high. Attach the chain to the center of the X you made with the wire, at the desired length.
- Place your swag hook where ever you would like your lamp to hang.
- Hang your lamp and plug it in.
Here is where my problem comes in. The socket kit I bought from the hardware store isn’t really long enough and the switch to turn on the light is closer to the bulb, meaning if I want to turn it on I have to stand on a chair to reach the switch.
So while this light is beautiful and technically does what I want it to, it needs a few tweeks to be exactly what I want. And that’s OK. A lot of times you will find that something doesn’t succeed on the first try, I almost always start a project with a way of achieving it in mind, only to have to rethink several of the steps because its just not quite working.
It took Thomas Edison 1,000 try’s before he came up with the perfect light bulb, so I’m OK with it taking me two or three tries at a pendant light.
Welp, that wraps up our first ever chicken wire week. What did y’all think? Let me know if you try out any of these projects and how it goes. If you come up with a better way of doing something please let me know, (I’m a huge proponent of working smarter not harder).
Share this:
Liebster Award
The Peony Project
The Peony Project
VINTAGE FRONTIER 