Tada! Here’s my magicky mushroom lamp thing. I was inspired by an instructable to do this, but I didn’t follow the instructions, as I’m lazy, and I don’t know enough about using LEDs to follow the instructions well.
I started by molding a blend of translucent and glow-in-the-dark skulpey around a mini set of LED Christmas lights. I picked up the lights at Dollar General or some such place a couple of years ago for around $3, so I would not have been heartbroken had this ridiculous plan not worked out. I took the batteries out of the battery pack, and backed the whole thing. The battery pack housing warped some in the oven, just for the record. The lights survived intact, though.
Next, I took some blue board, cut it into two pieces, a larger one and a slightly smaller one. The larger one was to be the base of the lamp. I cut a hole in the larger one to fit the battery pack into, then taped down wires leading to mushrooms, here and there. I cut up the smaller blue board so that I’d have room to run wires, but I was kind of sloppy with this. I glued it all together with wood glue.
Next, I mixed up a batch of pre-made paper-mache pulp and used it to give the blue board a ‘bark’ texture. I gobbed it pretty generously in the cracks and gaps between the various pieces of blue board to hide wires and give the thing that ‘side of a tree’ look I was wanting.
After it dried, I painted the ‘bark’ with a black coat, dry brushed some gray, brown and white, and let a little bit of it dab onto the mushrooms, because mushrooms are never completely clean. Then I screwed in two wood screws into the back at a really fierce up angle, and hung the whole thing in my bathroom with a bit of picture hanging wire. That’s it!
Hope you all enjoyed seeing it, and maybe it’ll inspire you to make something neat! We’ll discuss my latest project next time!
Also, as an aside, I took these pictures with my brand new LG Optimus. It's a cool phone, but I'm still a bit lost as to it's functionality.
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