Commissions are tricky. You have a customer that has an idea that can range anywhere from “make this”, or “make something like this”, to “Make something like this out this”. You have to balance their idea’s with your own as well as what you can actually do. Then you have to convey what your idea will actually look like. That’s where I run into the most trouble. I get the idea, and while I can see it in my head, I tend to struggle with sketching that idea out for the client to see and approve of before I actually start building it. Such was the case with this chandelier. Some neighbors of ours were moving into a new house and wanted me to take a small chandelier from their old house and turn it into something big enough to hang over their 9′ x 4′ dinning room table. The old chandelier was from the 1930’s, made of brass with long strands of hand-cut crystals, but also only about a foot and a half across. The customer made clear that they had no particular attachment to any part of the chandelier, only that they wanted to be able to be able to look at the new light and know that a part of their old home had moved with them. They showed me some ideas that they liked, and I went back to my shop to think about it. The idea I came up with was to to bend a long oval out of steel and run chains of crystals across it with long filament-style LED bulbs lighting the crystals from above. I would then suspend the whole thing from stainless steel cable attached to a piece of inverted angle iron mounted to the ceiling. I spent two and a half hours modeling the idea in SketchUp, but the image above is the best that I could do. I showed the client and told them that this is what I had in mind, but not exactly. Fortunately, they trusted me enough to give me the green light, and I got to work. The original chandelier had over 2 hundred individual crystals, but after hand cleaning each of them, I knew I was still going to need more. So I went on Ebay and found a seller that had several lots of octagonal crystals that were close to the same size as most of the antique crystals, and bought everything they had. I then found a different seller that had unbent brass clips to join all of the crystals together and bought six hundred of those. With all that in hand, and the metal frame made, I started laying out the pattern of the crystals. Because I had several different sizes, and only a finite number of each, I spent well over a week trying different layouts and orderings before I settled on something I was happy with. I then pre-bent every one of the clips over a small anvil I made to ensure that each crystal would be spaced uniformly. With the crystal layout (mostly) figured out, I took everything back apart, wired in the lamp sockets, ran the support cable, and painted all the metal with a “mirror” paint to make everything as shiny as possible. To give some character to the mounting bracket attached to ceiling, I added on some of the brass arms and crystal ‘candle cups’ from the original chandelier. Then I hung the whole thing up in my shop to see how it was going to look. I liked it, but it still seemed too plain on the ends. So I started playing around with adding drops of crystals to each side until I had a pattern that wasn’t overly crowded, but still drew attention towards the ends of the chandelier and away from the four foot-long lightbulbs. After I’d settled on everything, and convinced myself I couldn’t add any more crystals, I started counting them. I counted three times, and each time I came up with the same number. The client thought it was hilarious, and so we hung it up in their home. A true beast of a chandelier, four foot long and eighteen inches wide, complete with 666 crystals.

Approximate Dimensions:
Length 48″
Width 18″
Drop 22″