DIY Gradient Wood Tasting Spoon Pendant Light – Part 3 — Preparing the Spoon Bowls (This is the exciting part!)

I estimated that this pendant light would require about 1200 spoons, so I started this project a few weeks ago by cutting the handles of spoon bowls using wire snips. And then a few days ago, I spent an afternoon and evening sanding all the spoon bowls to round out the cut. Here’s how they looked before with a straight cut edge…

And here’s what they looked like after I sanded them.

Since I didn’t have a bench sander, I used my small handheld rotary sander and used my knees to hold it upside down. After several hours, my legs felt numb, but I grabbed all the spoons with sand.

After that, I had to prime a total of 1200 spoon bowls. I started priming them one by one with a little craft brush, but quickly realized how insane that plan was. So instead, I laid them out flat on a work surface and sprayed them.

This is a very frustrating process because they are very light weight and sometimes the force of the spray will send them flying. But even with that frustration, it’s faster and easier than painting one by one with primer.

So by the time I got to work on these yesterday, the spoon bowls were all cut, rounded and primed. I started my work yesterday by grouping the spoon bowls into 15 piles of each of the 15 colors I plan to use. I started by giving each spoonful a quick sanding by hand to smooth out any rough finish from the spray primer.

Then using a small craft brush, I painted the back of the spoons with liquid gold gilding.

It’s a two-part process because I have to hold the tip while painting most of the back, then let it dry, and then paint the tip I held on the first go round. But this is the fun part. I can sit and paint spoon bowls while I listen to podcasts all day.

After the backs dried (and gold plating dries very fast), I flipped them over and painted the fronts of the spoon bowls using the paints I mixed in part 2 of this project. Each spoon needs two coats of paint to get the full color. And even the top of those little cups of paint I mixed had plenty of two coats of paint, huge rings of light that would hold most spoon bowls.

After the paint dried, I again used a small brush and liquid gold gilding to paint around the edges to “frame” the colorful paint. I purposely made it messy, random, just like I did with the spoon artwork I made.

After all, I still need to cover the edges. I tried using a brush and liquid gold gilding, but it wasn’t as fast and easy as I hoped.

So I got my 18kt gold leafing pen and it was perfect for covering those edges.

And the last step is to drill a hole for the jump ring that holds these colorful little ornaments in the wire lampshade cage. For this, I used my Dremel and a small drill bit.

So I did all those steps in assembly line fashion, one pile, one color, at a time. I only got two colors done, but these are the colors that require a lot of spoons. As I go along, I need fewer and fewer spoons for each subsequent color. But here is my pile of red all prepped and ready to hang on the wire cage. I need 88 of these…

And here’s a darker pink for the next ring. I need 84 of these…

And then I only finished one in the third color so I could take pictures of the process. 😀 But I want 80 in the third color. So I continue that process until I’ve finished all 15 colors, each subsequent color requiring four fewer spoons than the previous color.