Morris Chair – hard choice.

It’s hard to believe but it’s almost done. 🙂

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Making lighting for roombox

Remember that art nouveau roombox that I made some time ago?  It was sold but came back to me, because I was asked to make lighting for it. That flower chandelier was made especially for this room. I also needed to make that Tiffany table lamp functional. I decided to try LEDs for this project. They are much brighter and don’t burn out  as often as usual bulbs. I was looking for warm light LEDs for quite a while, and I was lucky to find very small (5 or 3mm, I don’t remember) and very cheap ones. So the first problem was solved.

The only problem with LEDs is that you have to find appropriate resistors, so say hello to physics course at school you hated so much. Ohm’s law – I had to look it up in Wikipedia for the first time in so many years. I had the resistors I needed but all this counting, colour code etc. was a bit too overwhelming to me. My husband though was curious enough to find a good video about so called LED drivers that would eliminate my problem with resistors. Here it is –  http://www.chipdip.ru/en/video.aspx?vid=ID000306334. To make it easier for you, these LEDs drivers  provide constant current of 20 mA in a circuit (most LEDs that I have are 20 mA), so you don’t need to count anything just connect this driver to a simple circuit. It’s very small by the way:

From the left to the right – small case for three drivers, driver itself and driver with small pins to make the soldering easier.  So if you lazy to learn all this Ohm’s magic, drivers will save a lot of time for you.

For my chandeliers I used three LEDs, they are very small, so it wasn’t a problem.

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One more chandelier

Last time I posted the frame and some flowers for a chandelier, this time the process of soldering:

I made the roses and leaves with polymer clay, every flower is attached to copper wire. To cover soldered spots I used acrylic paste.

Here is the result:

I totally forgot to show you the original chandeliers that inspired this work. Actually, I saw a lot of them in different antiques catalogs, usually French. But recently I found some Spanish chandeliers, also very beautiful. I also found that some were made with porcelain flowers, some with glass, some flowers were made of copper and brass. Also I saw all kinds of shapes and colors. Just perfect for me !:) Usually I see such chandeliers called  Louis XV-style.

Here’s one of the chandeliers I found:

A bit too dark for me, to be honest, but lovely.

I decided to make a central lamp out of bead:

My first choice was the pink one, but later I found that it was too dark for my LED lamp. So I took transparent one.

It was worth it:

And as I used LED light,  you can see that it shines only in one direction. Not really good for a room.

So I decided to try this lifehack – super glue and a bit of tin foil. You glue it to the tip of the lamp and here it is – the foil reflect the light, so it looks much better now. You can see by comparing previous photo with the one below. Obviously, the room is darker than it looks on the photo, but the direction of light is well seen. Maybe it’s just my perception, I don’t know 🙂

One more photo:

And about LED lamps, usually I don’t like them at all, most of them give this cold white light, that looks awful. I found some with warm white light, but they were a bit too big for using in miniature. So my husband suggested that we could buy LEDs with wave length= X-0.33. Y-0.36.  Don’t ask me what it means 🙂 It’s all my husband ideas, he suggested that such LEDs were neutral white, not cold white. And I think he was right, the one in photos looks “warmer” to me than the ones I have.  These LEDs are 5mm diameter.

I liked the result – so I think I’ll keep on looking for small warm-white LEDs.

It’s not that bad after all

With the help of my fellow bloggers, I did it! Brazing is much easier for me, after several hours of practice. I’m almost happy with this frame and plan to make couple more, just need to finish sketches.

Here’s one of the epoxy roses that I made, not sure about using them though, maybe I should add more color, crystal clear look a bit plain to me.

Glass beads for miniature lights

Last week I received a package with lace bobbins (50 pairs), they were all unspangled, so I went to the nearest beads shop to buy some beads. I love this place, lots of cute things, I cannot leave it without buying something.  I found these wonderful glass beads, but they are not for bobbins, I’m afraid.

As these two weeks were all about making lights I immediately thought these beads would make perfect lamp shades. You would just need to cut them in half.

I googled at first to find someone who did it before but to no avail. So, here’s my first try.

You need Proxxon/Dremel/whatever tool,  diamond wheel and sticky tape.  Glasses for protection and mask  is a must for me too.  I also marked a cutting line on the bead.

Here’s how you need to fix the bead on a tape:

And just cut it off! 🙂 At first I thought that glass would break, but I was lucky, the edge is even. You can also sand the bead to make it even better 🙂

Nice one:

I’m very excited about it,there’s lot of beads with different sizes and shapes, lot’s of things to explore.