Buy a nice-looking old chrome coffeemaker at an estate sale.
Take it home and spend a couple of hours trying to get the two halves apart.
Eventually realize that the rubber seal in the middle is fused to the metal from overheating.
Destroy the seal, bit by bit. Success! You now have two separate pieces.
Ignore the pieces for several months while you work on other projects.
Find a stainless-steel wok lid at a thrift store. Take it home.
Procrastinate through the holidays.
Decide it’s time. Start drilling.
Stack up the pieces. Realize you need a couple more parts. Find one in the small parts stash. Admit the other one stumps you.
Take a break. Eat lunch. Realize what you need is part of the coffeemaker, it’s just in the wrong place.
Start cutting. Keep cutting. Cut yourself. Swear a little.
Stack up the pieces again. Cut pipe and string them together. Feel ambivalent.
Set it aside for a few days.
Drill more holes. Clean the parts.
Rough assemble the lamp, but don’t wire it.
Take it upstairs and stare at it for a week. Tinker with it occasionally.
Admit it’s still not right. Realize how to fix it.
Start cutting. Finish cutting. Stack up the pieces again. Phew, finally!
Assemble and wire the lamp. Do the fiddly finish work.
Insert bulbs. Plug it in and turn it on. Bask.
(Optional) Write a post. Leave some things out.
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!
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.
“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
Depending on the viewer’s mood, they seem poised to move (sideways) or to speak (obliquely). They might foretell the future, or pounce upon you as you sleep. Or simply squat, “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen,” glowing and ominous.
A couple of years ago, I was browsing the aisles of my local 99 Ranch Market – a great place to kill a spare hour with a friend – when I found these really fun tins (full of crackers, of course). I had to have them.
When the time rolled around to put the tins to use, I found some plain white shades to go on top. But they seemed not quite adequate. Then I remembered the joss paper I’d acquired on another trip to 99 Ranch…and the die was cast.
Luck & Crackers lamps
I’ve been told that the bases and shades seem to be speaking different languages. I can see – or rather hear – that. But given that the bases by themselves speak three or four…well, I don’t see the problem.
“The mind is made out of used parts, engineered by a blind watchmaker.”
-Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide
I was reading Lehrer’s book (in which he quotes Rene Descartes on emotions, which is where the title of this post comes from) while I was working on the lamp below. So in some sort of loose, off-kilter way, it all seems connected. Plus, I just love that quote. It perfectly describes the way I feel most days these days.
Schrödinger’s Parakeet
I suppose I could spin a line of BS that this thing is a model of the human mind, or make some joke about cartoon ideas (bubble, light bulb). Or I could repeat my usual story about patience: having one piece (thanks Dad!) and waiting around for its perfect mate to appear, but you’ve heard it already.
Mostly I just like how the lamp looks like some goofy Hammer horror movie/mad scientist apparatus. Oh, and then there’s the name I’ve given it – which is of course nonsense, but not much more so than its namesake.
Sometimes the same idea, with small variations, can give pretty different results. Think of steaming cafe au lait and sweet, black iced coffee. That’s these two lamps.
Percolander 2: Jules Verne
Frosty the Madman
Made of colanders and coffee pots of different vintages, plus lids, a dessert mold, part of a cocktail shaker, a valve handle, and lamp parts old and new, one looks like an unlikely spacecraft – part rocket, part balloon; the other, something from a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie. Not much alike, but definitely fished from the same gene pool.
“A flying saucer? You mean the kind from up there?”
“Yeah, either that or its counterpart.”
Plan 9 from Outer Space
I’ve had these colanders for ages, and I tried a couple of times to use them. But nothing quite worked out. Then I realized they just wanted to fly solo – or maybe in formation – over a bar or kitchen island, bringing a message of peace and silliness.
