Dining Room DIY Flower Chandelier Progress

First, let me just say that Tiger does not make things easy for me. 😀

As you know, he’s our newest addition. He was a stray and now he’s fully a part of the Linauer household. And this cat has no concept of “I’m busy, I can’t pet you right now.” He’s into everything. I was sitting at my worktable trying to make 135 clay flowers, and he insisted on sitting on the table right in front of me, rubbing up against my hands, and demanding attention. And as I would line up the finished (but still wet and pliable) flowers, he would walk through them, sniff them, and knock them over. He’s adorable, but my goodness, he sure slows me down! 😀 It’s hard to get too upset, though, because he’s such a sweet cat. We’ve never had a cat that wants so much attention like he does.

Anyway, I did manage to get all 135 flowers made, and I love how these turned out.

Obviously, because of their size and simple shape, these were so much easier to make than the flowers I made for the walk-in closet chandelier.

So making 135 of these small flowers took way less time than making flowers for the closet chandelier. I really love how light and dainty these flowers turned out.

They’re not quite finished, though. Because I’m a perfectionist, I am going to spend some time sanding these flowers to get rid of the rough areas. The air-dry clay I used is great to work with, but since I don’t have a lot of experience, I do have trouble getting it to a really smooth finish. Thankfully, it sands very smoothly and easily once it’s completely dry.

And once they’re sanded, I’m going to paint them. They’ll remain white, but I also bought an iridescent finish that I’m going to try on them.

After I finished the flowers, I moved on to the metal rods. I needed to bend these rods, and I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it because they’re solid metal and very rigid.

I tried bending the rods around several things like paint cans, but the rods were too rigid and ended up denting the paint cans instead of bending around the paint cans. So I looked around the house for something round, solid, and heavy that I could bend the rods around, and I ended up using my 25-pound kettlebell. It worked perfectly!

I’m not sure if I bent them enough. I’ll have to wait until I start putting the chandelier together and then I’ll see if I may need to add more of a curve. But holding one end with the pliers and using my hand to wrap the other end around the kettlebell made the job very easy. Of course, the longer rods were easier to bend than the short ones, but I made it work.

So that is the progress so far! I’m anxious to get this thing put together. I know that mine probably won’t look as pretty as the inspiration chandelier.

That chandelier has 160 leaves on it, and mine will only have 135 flowers on it unless I can come up with a way to add more. But considering that that’s a $1700 chandelier, and I’ve spend less than $200 on mine, I can live with mine being a little less impressive than that one. And since no one sitting in my dining room will have that chandelier to compare mine to, I think it will work out just fine.