14 Pinterest Challenge- $5 Drum Shade

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I was incredibly excited when Katie, Sherry, Megan, and Michelle  announced the Pinterest Challenge. It’s a little thing (unofficial) they dreamed up to do something about some of those hoarded pins on Pinterest.

Well I’m back today to share the goods, yep I overachieved and got it done on Tuesday, around 7 pm. Better late than never?

Let’s start from the beginning shall we? We needed a light for this seen-better-days situation in our entryway. 

We had been looking for a good fit in our entryway for quite some time. We scoured the big box stores, home improvement stores, and thrift stores including the Habitat Restore for about a month. Everything was either not the price we wanted to spend, needed a pair (which we weren’t quite ready for), or looked wonky.

We had given up on that idea and always had a plan B up our sleeves which was to make something. Scouring the net, I stumbled upon this inspiration:

Pinterest | Source + Source

After watching the video multiple times, we only needed to pick up fabric, two embroidery hoops, and possible embellishments as we already had the clips, poster board, and glue on hand. The plan was just to wing it for the diffuser.

We then took rough measurements of the existing light fixture which we determined the drum shade needed to be 8” or greater, then headed off to Jo Ann Fabrics.

Maybe it’s just me but it seems like there is just way too much inspiration, choices, and visuals to be had in craft stores (in a good way). Needless to say we were in the store for about two hours. I have to say the boyfriend was a champ even after I placed the same ream of fabric in the cart three times. Guess I should have saved that shopping trip for a solo event, or at least have him roam a different store nearby.

Which happen to be the back story behind the hey girl (from Valentine’s Day Fun):

Back to the drum shade. The embroidery hoops happen to be the easy decision, we held up all the sizes and choose 12” to give enough room, an extra two inches, for the light to breathe.

Then came the fabric decision, since we didn’t need a lot of fabric we weren’t too picky on the price since anything less than a yard would be far less expensive than buying a new drum shade. And here are the choices that landed in the cart.

All of them just weren’t right- the floral was too large and introduced too many additional colors to the room, the black and grey was too girly, and the quatrefoil pattern may have clashed since we had two fabric patterns in the small space already.

While roaming Jo Ann’s, I found this neat fabric but it only came in purple which wasn’t as bold as we wanted to go; rather I used it as inspiration and the final decision.

Instead we picked up .38 of a yard in navy blue thicker polyester fabric. It was more than enough to make ‘fringes.’

I couldn’t wait to get home and turn the fabric into a shaggy/ruffle style drum shade.

Possibly the best part, a complete shade for less than $5, although I used a few things lying around. See:

Yes, I was lucky to have my boyfriend so we could complete separate transactions and yes I was being cheap using a 40% coupon for each hoop (since the fabric was 50% off).

How about another peek at her all finished?

In person she looks a lot less girly, mainly because of her navy skin. And tomorrow I'll have the full blown tutorial. I'll also include the changes I made from the inspirational drum shade tutorial.

On how this fabric:

 Turned to this:

And a lot more after pictures, so see ya here tomorrow! Feel free to send over pics and links via the B&W O Facebook page, comments below with a link to your blog, flickr, instagram, etc.

P.S. the entryway is really coming together but we have four more rooms to tackle first. So no peaking.