Here’s a new take on the blender lamp concept. It uses a color-changing LED (sorry, no video this time), or you can swap in a clear, antique-style bulb.
It’s a little bit spaceship, a little bit mad scientist, and a whole lot of fun. I call it The Lamp with Two Brains. Visit my Etsy shop for details.
Chrome Coffeecake lamp
The Albany Film Fest is coming up next week. You can see this lamp in the flesh at the Friday night gala and possibly on Saturday as well. After that it will be available in my Etsy shop.
Over the past several months, I’ve found several old heaters that, though they hardly fit a traditional lamp/lighting category, nonetheless seemed to have potential. Although at the time I bought them it wasn’t quite clear to me how I could use them.
The first one was just a shell – of an old maybe-gas, maybe-kerosene heater – that I found in an antique store. Some paint on the top and bottom, a nice reproduction vintage lightbulb, and a few bits and pieces, and it looks like this:
La Cage à Lumière
A few weeks later, I stumbled on another heater, electric this time, at the Depot for Creative Reuse. It took several hours to get it disassembled and cleaned up, and even then I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
But then I remembered something the instructor had mentioned in a class I’d just taken at The Crucible. And it came to me: This would be a perfect housing for color-changing LED strips. And after a grueling trip to IKEA just before Thanksgiving (don’t try this at home, kids), I had what I needed.
Here’s the result, in living color (apologies for the wavery camera work).
Both these lamps are available in my Etsy shop, along with details about size, price, and functionality. I also expect to have other LED lamps coming up. Stay tuned!
A few photos from the Art Museum of Los Gatos’ Holiday Marketplace. See more on the museum’s Facebook page.
Recently, I was asked to participate in a holiday fund-raiser at the Los Gatos Art Museum (opening today!), and they asked specifically for more hanging lights. So I dug into the cache of tins I’ve collected over the last year and made these:
Then, I just kept going, and made some table lamps:
The latter are available in my Etsy shop, and there will be more to come. Stay tuned.
(Many thanks to my family members who contributed to this effort! You know who you are.)
I’m not by nature a tidy person. I let things go, too long. Clutter piles up until I’m forced to deal with it. I seldom dust, or clean the bathtub.
But when I’m making a lamp, I tend to go the opposite direction. I want to make it maybe too neat, too matchy, too shiny.
So this time, when I found this beautifully tarnished silver coffee pot, I vowed to work with it as is: chipped spout, uneven patina, slight off kilterness.
That part was easy. It was the shade that was hard. I’d picked up several wire breadbaskets, liking the shapes and figuring there must be some way to use them. And I realized that one of them would be nearly perfect for this lamp – except that it needed to be turned inside out. Which meant disassembling and then reassembling it, preferably without destroying it in the process.
I’d work on it for awhile, hit a snag, and set it aside. Weeks would go by while I worked on other projects. Prying the bottom off was easy. Cutting the wires short enough to work loose took time, trial and error, perseverance. And of course some came off altogether. Reassembly was easy, but reattaching the wires…not so much. I set it aside again.
Eventually though, it came together. One or two last minute inspirations added a bit of extra flair. And now that it’s done I’m sure I was right. Letting the work develop in its own time allowed for better ideas – and even materials – to come along.
It’s almost as if the lamp invented herself. And perhaps she did.
Ms. Havisham
For details or to purchase, visit my Etsy shop.
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
-T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“
Consider, if you will, this pair of oddities made from parts of chafing dishes married to, in one case, a glass bowl, and in the other, the shade from a ceiling fixture.
Nemo’s Brain
Waltzing Medusa
Dare to eat a peach, or maybe two, in my Etsy shop.
