DIY Beaded Chandelier Tutorial

I’m excited to share a crazy inventive tutorial for a diy beaded chandelier from  Britt over at A Penny Saved.  She created this amazing diy beaded chandelier  out of a hanging fruit basket, a ton of beads, and a simple light socket kit.

Gather your materials:

LOTS of beaded necklaces, cut into long strands (the Mardi Gras kind)
Metal hanging garden basket
A spool of thin-gauge wire
Wire cutters
Wire clothes hanger
Pendant light kit (cord & socket)
Metal chain to hang the fixture
Light fixture mounting bracket, bolt & loop
Light fixture ceiling cap

Start with a hanging garden basket.

Go ahead and paint it to blend with your beads (or the finished color of your chandelier if you plan to paint your beads).  I used a ladder to suspend the chandelier while I worked on it.

Top it off.  Because I wanted to wire this fixture, the metal hook on the basket wasn’t going to cut it.  I needed to be able to add a pedant light cord and a chain somehow.  I ended up wiring a light fixture ceiling bracket to a ring made from a bent clothes hanger.  The loop on top screws onto a hollow bolt that screws into the bracket, which later allowed me to attach a chain.

Add a little structure.  I wired on a ring (again, made from a bent hanger) about half way between the top of the chandelier and the lower ring for a little more shape.  This allowed the beaded strands to swag a little without the metal chains showing.

Start beading!  After figuring out that my beaded strands were just a tad longer than I needed to go from the top to the bottom of the fixture with a little swag in the middle, I started attaching them around the top ring by looping wire around the top bead of each strand and the metal ring.

My chandelier looked a little crooked at this point, but straightened up once we attached the chain and hung it.

Trim away the excess.  If your strands are a little longer than you need, just cut off the extra after attaching at the bottom of the fixture. Aaaaand bead some more.  This is definitely the most time-consuming part.  Just make sure that you have good coverage all the way around.  I attached all my strands at the top first, then at the middle (the top part of the basket — so they would swag a little), then at the bottom.  In the photo above I had attached the beads at the top and middle and was trying to make sure there weren’t any bare spots before attaching them at the bottom.

Add a chain and ceiling cap.  

Paint it up.  Give the whole thing a coat or two of paint if you want.  I decided to do this because I found that it made the wires and chains blend in better with the beads.  I used this to spray the fixture a custom color.

Hang it.


Admire.  

Thank you Britt, for the awesome tutorial!  Go check out A Penny Saved to see Britt’s many other creative transformational projects.