DIY Oriental Lantern
November 5th, 2005
Digital photography in the dark is great. My Nikon Coolpix has been banged around so much that there are a bunch of dead pixels, the memory card makes noise and the LCD screen doesn't turn on half the time. If they weren't so expensive for the model of digital cameras that I'm accustomed to, I'd definitely go out and get another, but probably not a Nikon. I'd definitely look into Canon and Kodak. Are the Olympus ones any good? Anyway, that's not at all what this is about.
Aubrey bought a set of shoe racks from a store (it starts with Wal* and ends with Mart) but true to most of the stuff that comes from those places, it was crap. The road to ruin is paved with good intentions!
We realized these weren't going to work. No way. So since Aubrey is really into the Asian theme, I decided to turn them into an oriental lantern. It was really pretty easy and essentially free (minus the cost of screws, tracing paper, and glue, all of which I already had). Also I have a bunch of slightly warped dowel-type sticks left over.
Basically I just screwed the pieces together using the holes that were already in the wood from the dowels! It worked great, very simple, and it's probably more sturdy that it ever was as a shoe rack.
Once that was done, I glued some tracing paper to the insides of the lattice to diffuse the candle light within. It should be noted that the paper should be safe from bursting into flames as long as you don't have, say, fifty giant candles in there. That being said, it's not my problem if you set your house on fire - fire is always dangerous, so be careful!
In hindsight it would have been easier to glue individual pieces of tracing paper on before I screwed it together, but at that point in time I was planning on staining the wood darker, but later changed my mind. Oh well. This is basically it. I thought about handles or a base or something but in the end simplicity was best for this quick little project.
It looks absolutely fantastic at night and gives off a great, warm diffused light.
These pictures are with a simple two-wick candle that I made for Aubrey back in the day.
All in all a wonderfully rewarding project to recycle a crappy product from a megastore.
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