What to do with $5 and a lot of sleepless nights
I’ve been having a harder time falling asleep at night lately. Though, oddly enough, I keep dozing off around 7pm, napping for 20 minutes, and then staying up for the rest of the night. So with my many hours between last call and dawn I watch a lot of downloaded movies, and I work on whatever small project I happen to be on at the moment.
I saw a really interesting lamp at Urban Outfitters the other day, but I couldn’t find it on their website. In the store it wasn’t even for sale, it was just some odd display piece. What was interesting about it was that it was made out popsicle sticks. The sticks were alternately overlapping, and bound with elastic so that the whole thing could flex and bend into different shapes. The lamp itself was a 6-sided hexagon and because of the wood and spacing of the wood, it looked like it would really add some texture and shadows to a room.
So, a box of popsicle sticks costs about $3 and a football field’s length of twine (I chose to use twine instead of elastic) ran about $3 as well. I ended up using almost all 300 popsicle sticks and about 10 feet of the twine. I chose twine because the elastic seemed to have too much rebound. You could bend the lamp, but the elastic seemed to hold it too tightly together and it’s melt back into place. The twine also gives a nice crappiness to the lamp. I just hope the whole thing doesn’t burst into flames. Here’s what I came up with:
This thing took about a ridiculous amount of time to make. Each of the sticks had to be drilled on both ends (and they crack in half often), and they had to be threaded and woven into each other with the twine. I think it probably took 10-20 hours of labor to make this stupid thing. But hey, it looks neat and I can change it up when I’m bored.
It’s quite possibly the most tedious thing I’ve ever done. I think it might be time to break out the sleeping pills again.
wow, it turned out pretty awesome!