One Room Challenge Week 5: Adventures in Lighting + Other Details

Well, well, well. It’s week 5 of my living room transformation with The One Room Challenge and boy has this week been…muddled??? If you haven’t been following along, I am taking 8 weeks to transform my living room into an eclectic, soulful and interesting space. There have been some wins, some temporary failures and a lot of artistic experimenting in the time in between,

If you’ve been following along on Instagram stories, you know that I’ve been wrestling to try to sculpt a large beautiful ceiling light reminiscent of the images shown above.

Last week, I documented my humiliating descent of trying to work with wire and rice paper with not enough knowledge. This week I really tried to conquer my uncertainties and try to create this sculptural fixture again, but this time using cotton instead of rice paper.

The Success:

I think this process of sewing pleats into cotton and moving wire through pre-sewn ridges offers a lot more control and precision than I felt with rice paper. I love how the pleats were looking and the fabric was a nice warm white after I gave it a tea bath.

The Not Success:

First off: oh my gosh this picture. I really don’t have a coherent photo of this fixture since it needs to be suspended to be visible, so this image is a still frame from a video I took. Has the world ever seen a more “I am not sure about this thing” face??? Oh well. You can’t say I haven’t been honest about my feelings. Anyway, I digress.

While I like a lot of what I’m working with, the fixture ultimately still feels a little floppy and under-sculpted. I would say it’s more reminiscent of a simple IKEA-esque fixture (no shade, that’s just not what I was going for).

I think to improve, I will need to add some kind of starch or fabric stiffener. I also see potential for coating the whole thing in beeswax, but we’ll see. Additionally, I think I could add more pleats at the top of the fixture to make a more unique and dynamic shape, since I wasn’t very inspired to go a half-dome, it just kind of happened.

The Success, Again:

Ah, commerce to the rescue! While I keep pushing myself to learn about a whole slew of materials I am unfamiliar with, there are still plenty of things needed to keep the project moving. This week, I ordered the area rug (!!) a decision roughly 3 years in the making. I also ordered pillow covers, and a few delightful accessories both vintage and handmade that I will share at the reveal.

This upcoming week, I’m going to fine tune my light fixture and start on the large wall art (40x55 to be exact). I’ll be honest, my confidence is definitely waning as I endure a few natural knocks from failure that goes along with learning. My main consolation is that I am finally trying things I have been wanting to experiment with for years. Alas, no good deed goes unpunished!

Stay tuned to see if I ever figure out how to wrangle this light fixture and if my nearly decade dormant art-rendering skills are ready to reveal themselves again!

Until next time,

-Aimee