Shiny, gold!

This is the new light in the dining room. Labor was about 5 hours, doing touch-up paint on scratches, re-wiring (although I skipped re-wiring the little twist knob at the bottom), finding a plate to hang it from, and then hanging. And some more touch-up.

The gold paint was mixed from craft store liquid acrylic leftover from a medieval icon project in college. It has a metallic sheen. The light has 4-5 different shades of gold and amber, so I mixed in raw sienna and raw umber canvas paint to make the colors. It took an hour of patient mixing and painting in thin layers to match chipped and scratched areas to the lovely original brass, green and coppery color. Even though the original finish held up to a soft toothbrush and water, when I tried to gently flake off acrylic errors the first finish came with it in specks, exposing tiny bits of clean aluminum underneath. There was no going back. Then it was covered with two coats of Zinsser spray shellac with a yellowish tinge. The tinge was helpful because the acrylic paint touch-ups didn't have the same translucence of the original "brass" paint. I think there is no finish as beautiful as the aged original; it makes me angry to see the "Professionally Refinished" fixtures on Ebay covered in swaths of solid, bright colors that, at least on fixtures like mine, are nothing like the original, subtle polychroming.

There are companies online that carry replacement porcelain sockets and cloth-covered wire, like Sundial Wire and Savta, but I decided to try Lowe's first. Surprisingly they had the exact same porcelain sockets, and without the hard-wiring, but with a different bracket. Lowe's also had replacement candelabra sockets, for vintage wall sconcery. They didn't have the fake wax candles made of paper for the candelabra (just a note for my future project) or the cloth wire, but I went ahead and bought zip cord and twisted it into a similar look. One of the bulbs is an appliance bulb for now. The existing fan support -which was only attatched to the ceiling plaster, not to the box!- is now attatched to a new multi-use plate which is sandwiched between the light fixture's support and two metal rectangles included with the plate. I removed most of the chain after realizing that chaining it to a hook above the dining table (off-center in the room) looked silly.



Pretty!