I’ve always dreamed of having a gorgeous sputnik chandelier, but they are usually on the smaller side and in the many thousands of dollars. I had planned on investing a little bit more of the house budget on the dining area’s light fixture because it would be basically the first thing you’d see when walking into our apartment. I wanted big and beautiful.
After deciding to buy the Gossip Girl sconces, I had sort of eaten up my lighting budget and needed to figure out something very inexpensive for the dining room. I thought the ubiquitous IKEA Maskros (which means dandelion in Swedish) might be a good base for a DIY sputnik.
I had some help from my Mom and Dad, who were in town visiting at the time. We busted out the entire project in a night and had the thing hung in the morning. I love projects like that!! (THANKS Mom and Dad! xo)
It’s a pretty simple project, with not a lot of tools required. I went with the 32″ diameter fixture because we have a big open space, but I would recommend the 22″ fixture (which is only $49!) for more traditional rooms.
The white, plasticy paper flowers are about 5″ wide. This is totally personal preference, but the thing I don’t love the most about the Maskros in it’s original state is all the shadows the flowers create and I needed this fixture to be a functional light source first and foremost. So I played around a bit with the proportions to shorten the petals and decided I like a 2.5″ diameter best.
I used a clear (making it easy to find the center) plastic cup with a 2.5″ base to trace a circle on each of the flowers. A little tip: I find that projects with many steps of many multiples are done best and fastest by focusing on one step at a time. I traced all the flowers first. Then I cut all the flowers, etc. Don’t get ahead of yourself in the steps for the sake of accuracy and efficiency.
If the weather had been better and if I didn’t live in NYC, I totally would have spray painted the whole thing using Rustoleum’s metallic line in the Brass finish. But, I am actually really happy with the look of the hand painting. It didn’t take that long, and I think the end look is a little less flat than spray paint – more mottled, like real gilded metal.
on the florettes. I used two boxes for the larger size Maskros.
Fabritac is hands down my favorite adhesive and it worked really well for this project. Super tight hold and a fast drying time. I needed only a small dollop on the bottom of each plate to attach the flower.
bottle!)
upholstery and carpet cleaner. It is so incredibly easy to use. Basically you dose the stain with the spray, let it sit for a sec, and then sort of rub it in with your finger. The stain will disappear before your eyes and won’t damage your carpet or fabric! The best part is there is no rinsing required at all. You can blot up the cleaning liquid with a towel if you want though. Fast and so easy!!
