IMPROVING CIRCULATION

Henry has a plain white ceiling fan in his bedroom, and it is very boring.

I decided I wanted to paint the 5 fan blades as well as the glass globe that covers the bulbs.

It took a while to decide what I wanted to paint on them - I wanted an obvious theme that would link all 6 pieces together, but I didn't want a childish theme (for example, doing 6 characters from a TV show).

I finally settled on it - constellations! I realized that the globe would be really beautiful to paint as Earth, especially since it has a frosted glass look to it. If painted from the inside, the frosting will look like cloud coverage when the light is on.

Even better was when I looked into which constellations would be most visible during his birth month - there are 5 which are best seen during that month. How auspicious!

The five constellations which will be included on the ceiling fan blades are:

• Libra
• Boötes
• Ursa Minor
• Lupus
• Circinus

Since the blades were going to get so much attention, I decided the globe should, too. I painted it to resemble Earth, specifically the western hemisphere.

I started with opening the above images in Inkscape and marking the stars that made up the constellations, as well as a few surrounding stars. I wanted to make stencils that I could paint over; first with white paint and then with glow in the dark. Just for extra science.

I then exported the dot images to one printable document so I could cut out the stencils and prep them for the fan blades.

As for the blades, I:

• Removed blades from ceiling fan
• Removed irons from blades
• Washed blades thoroughly with warm soapy water
• Sanded each blade with 180 grit paper
• 2 coats black paint with 10 minutes dry time between each coat
• 1 “coat” each navy blue and purple paint
• Let dry thoroughly before laying stencils over fan blades; two coats white for stars and 1 coat glow in the dark; stencils removed
• Fished off blades with satin clear coat before letting dry completely

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I decided somewhere along the line that I also wanted some themed beads for the pull chains. Lowe's didn't have anything like what I wanted. Maybe Michaels?