DIY Gradient Wood Tasting Spoon Pendant Light – Part 1

This gradient wood tasting spoon pinwheel that hangs in our living room is the best piece of art I’ve ever made. From the size of the wooden tasting spoons, to the colors, to the gold accents, I love everything about it. So when she suggested turning this idea into a pendant light for my studio, I was immediately on board with the idea.

I have been working on preparing the spoons for two weeks now. It was very time consuming and I was only 1/3rd done with preparing the spoons. I decided I needed about 1000 spoons for the light, which meant I had to cut off the handles of 1000 wooden spoons at the neck and then sand the rest of the bowls. Once I sand them all, I can start priming and painting the spoon bowls.

But yesterday, I decided to work on the other part of the pendant light, which is the actual frame where the spoon bowls are attached at the end. To make the frame, I purchased a 22-inch lamp shade wire that will hold the frame that attaches to the light/lamp (ie the top lamp shade ring). (Sorry, but I don’t know the specifications for these parts, and I can’t find my invoice from the place I bought them from.) Using the make-your-own-pendant-light kit from Lowes, I attached a 22-inch lamp shade wire to the light kit, and then Installed the lite.

See here from above. Please excuse all the confusion in the background.

In addition to that top ring, I also purchased 19 additional bottom lamp shade rings ranging in size from 21″ to 3″ and every inch in between. Not sure how many I’ll use, but my pinwheel artwork has 20 rows of spoons, so I bought 20 rings total.

After looking at several different options for connecting the rings together, I finally decided that this was the perfect opportunity to put my newly acquired jewelry making skills to work on a non-jewelry project. So I bought some beading wire…

And then I bought these Screw-tight crimp beads, when I make necklaces, I stopped using actual crimp beads because my necklace failed and fell apart when I wore it. When that happened, I was looking for a better way to secure the beads onto the beading wire and I found these screw-tight crimp beads. Each bead has a small screw on the side that is clamped onto the beading wire to secure it in place. This is what I use on my necklaces now, so I bought a package to use in my pendant light.

It was so small that I had a hard time focusing my camera on the actual screwdriver.

Anyway, you can see how small it is. It’s one of those little screwdrivers that you use to tighten the screws on a pair of glasses.

And to cut the beading wire, I used my little jewelry making wire cutters.

I cut pieces of beading wire to 3 inch lengths…

Then I bent the pieces of wire in half.

I wrapped the bent wire around the two lampshade rings, put the ends of the wire through the crimp bead, and then tightened the screw on the crimp bead. I used four pieces of wire to secure each lampshade ring to the previous ring.

I continued that process until I had 12 rings attached, each ring attached to the previous ring using four pieces of wire and four crimp beads.

You can see in the photo below how I staggered the wires with every other ring.

I stopped at 12 rings, but I may add three more for a total of 15 rings. Then after I sanded, primed and painted all the spoon bowls, I drilled a hole in each bowl and attached each one to the pendant light form using 10mm jump rings.