My kitchen has recessed lighting. A lot of recessed lighting. When we first moved in, I was thrilled about it simply because it was not a fluorescent light box that I had seen in so many other homes. Now, however, I dream of hanging a fab chandy over my little breakfast table and a cute little pendant lamp over my kitchen sink. But I can’t, because of all the bloody recessed lighting!
See, when you have a recessed light fixture, there’s a giant hole in your ceiling where the light bulb screws into the recessed socket. And you can’t just pop that recessed socket out and throw in a normal light fixture without patching ceilings and doing a bit of rewiring. All stuff that I don’t do.
I thought all was lost and I would just have to live with a kitchen with no character. But then I found the Portfolio Recessed Light Converter Kit at Lowe’s. It looks similar to this:
Basically, you take out the recessed light bulb, screw this baby into place and bingo bango, you have a pendant light. Ah-mazing. Luckily, it does not come with the lamp shade pictured above; in fact, there’s a pretty good variety of shades you can choose from. Of course, I didn’t like any of them.
So I decided to make my own. Also at Lowe’s I found a small drum shade (the kind that you slip over the base of a light fixture on a lamp and then screw in the bulb, if that makes sense). The opening inside the shade looked to be about the same size as the opening in all of the glass shades that were supposed to go with the pendant adapter kit. So I decided to give it a try…
This is how it turned out:
Not too shabby. I decided that I wanted to add a touch of color, though, so I decided to cover the lampshade with some lovely grey and yellow fabric to complement our newly painted walls.
So using a lampshade template I already had, I laid out the template on top of my fabric, pinned it, and then cut around it leaving about a half inch extra on all sides.
Then using a spray adhesive and fabric glue, I secured the fabric around the shade, folding the extra fabric on the top and bottom into the inside of the shade and gluing it down.
This is how it turned out! Super cute, right?
Well, then I decided to do a flat faux roman shade in that window in another fabulous grey and yellow fabric. I got that done this weekend and now I can’t decide if I like it with my cute drum shade or if I should replace the drum shade with a simple glass shade. You’ll have to help me decide, so stay tuned…
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