DIY Nursery: Truly a labor of LOVE

Since we moved into this house, I've been eyeing different ways to re-vamp the light fixtures in most of the rooms. We had the builder grade glass bowl fixtures or  "boob lights" as I like to call them. Well when we found out Saxton was in fact a boy, my chandelier dreams for the nursery quickly went down the drain. Apparently crystals and glitzy light fixtures are the farthest thing from masculine, according to Tom anyways! I beg to differ..but hey.. you pick your battles right?


So for the past two months I've been searching high and low for the perfect light element for the nursery. The windows face the brightest side of the house during the day, and I knew for nap time purposes anything with too much light would be a big no-no. So accompanied by the darkening no-sew curtains my lovely Mama made for us (she's a rockstar), I wracked my brain for ideas on how to create ambience and style paired with function as far as lighting goes.

This is what I came up with :)

Basically I took a standard drum shaped lamp shade off of a lamp we had in the upstairs bonus room (soon to be playroom..that's a WHOLE different project/headache) and had MacGuyver aka Tom figure out a way to attach it to the pre-existing fixture. We considered adding a ceiling medallion that I would paint to match the wall color, but decided that re-wiring the fixture was something we probably weren't skilled enough to do. I'd hate to have a fire in our house after all that flooding trouble we went through!

The fabric I chose for the the "chandelier" effect of the lamp shade was literally nothing more than two ivory target pillowcases and remnants of the curtain fabric that I cut and shredded into long strips. I then attached the strips, individually (this part was the longest of the process..nearly 5 hours of sitting on the floor..yikes) to the pieces of twine that I'd then hot glue to the lamp shade itself.

We then (yes, we..thanks babe) took the twine links and glued each one on to the lamp shade and then decided that we'd collect them all in the center, and pull them up from the inside to look more like a chandelier vs. cascading fabric "jellyfish" as Tom called it.

Here's some pictures of the before..during and after of this little project! Some people don't like it..but those people have no style ;) I'm very happy with how it turned out, and even more pleased that it only cost us $12 for the pillowcases and 5 hours of our time, oh ..and a massive back ache for momma today :) All very much worth it and it definitely has the feel that I was going for! Hope you enjoy!

**Sidenote** Please TRY and ignore the background as the rest of the nursery isn't finished yet! I am amazed my OCD is allowing me to put up photos with it not being perfect!