I made a lamp!

Last night, we broke a lamp. It was a fairly hideous, second hand ceramic lamp (sorry, whoever we got it from!). It fell off the table and got chipped, and then a few hours later, it got knocked off the table again and smashed. I took that as a sign that finally, this lamp's time in our collection of second and third hand furniture, was over. Yesss!

There are two pretty embarrassing qualities about me (actually there are a lot more, but hey, let's start with two), and they are: 1) I am extremely cheap, as in, I would much rather get something for free or cheap from someone else than buy a totally new one, and 2) I am really, really, really bad at math and putting things together. For the daughter of a family of engineers, I clearly missed a gene somewhere.

Anyway. These two qualities are good background info because they set you up for tonight's project: I made a new lamp! Out of the old one that I broke!

Since the actual lighting and cord part of the lamp still worked, I wanted to make another lamp out of it. I've seen lamps and chandeliers made out of mason jars lately, and I think they look really cool, in a hipster and kind of cheap-o way. But there was a long metal rod that housed the light cord up through the ceramic parts of the lamp, and that thing wasn't coming off, nor did I know of a gigantic mason jar that would hold it.

Luckily for me (and unluckily for my partner), I have kept a cool-looking bottle since November, in case I needed to use it one day. And with a little bit of fiddling, I made:

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Just to prove that it actually works

The bottle is pretty sturdy, which is why I chose it instead of a wine bottle. The metal rod was really long, so to cover up the empty space at the top, I cut a plastic cork in half and stuck it in. I just happened to have a cork...it's one of the other projects that I'm planning, which hopefully you will one day see if it's not too embarrassing. I swear, I'm not a hoarder.

Not bad for someone who can't figure out how to build IKEA furniture or put up new curtains, eh?

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