Plastic cup lampshade
Issue #34
Craft-off Contest: second place
By Peggy Brown
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 3:04pm
Peggy Brown is on a mission to inspire creativity and uncover the playful spirit in everybody — through developing funky crafts and activities, inventing toys, and writing stories and books. She’s a professional creative thinker, adding whimsy and interest to everything from kids’ games to corporate projects to social services programs. Visit peggybrown.net and collectopiabooks.com to get inspired.
skill level: junior
total cost: $10
Supplies
• used lamp with a crummy shade (about $5)
• 200 paper or plastic cups (about $5)
Tools
• hot glue
Note: The cup lampshade project isn’t as complicated as it looks. You can use any kind of paper or plastic cups. I made mine with 5-ounce Dixie Riddle Cups because I get a kick out of them after brushing my teeth. The finished lampshade is about 2 feet in diameter, so if you use 16-ounce cups, you'll end up with a lampshade the size of a VW. When you finish yours, put it in the window, turn it on, and your neighbors will be whistlin' Dixie!
Go to it
1. Remove the lampshade from the old lamp. Cut off the fabric covering until you're left with the metal armature. You just need something that can support your new Dixie Cup shade and keep it from coming into contact with the hot light bulb. You don't need the large metal ring from the bottom of the shade, but save it for future projects.
2. Squirt a pea-sized blob of hot glue on the rim of one cup and another one directly below it on the bottom of the same cups side. Then join it to a second cup. Hold it still 'til the glue sets up. Blow on the glue for quicker drying.
3. The trick is to glue the cups together in "flowers" of seven cups each. Once you get a few seven-cup flowers made, glue the "flowers" to each other. Don't freak out if your cups don't all fit together perfectly. It's impossible to make a sphere out of 5-ounce Dixie cups by connecting seven-cup-flowers in this fashion. When you get a bunch of seven-cup-flowers glued together, go back and fill in the gaps with single cups where you need them. Keep going until you have the better part of a sphere.
4. Voila! Place the metal armature over the bulb on your lamp base, and place your new lampshade over it, making sure there are a few inches of air space between the cups and the bulb. In the immortal words of someone very famous, "Let there be light!" And there was. And it was good.
Tips: Use a compact fluorescent light bulb in your lamp. The bulb is much cooler than an old-fashioned bulb, thereby reducing your chances of melting the wax coating on your Dixie cups. If everybody in America replaced just one old bulb with a compact fluorescent, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.
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