The Never Ending Project... Ends

It feels like forever ago that I found out that I could DIY this light. That thing looks amazing right?

Parlour via Pinterest

And can you believe that it's made out of coffee filters? I know. Amazing again.

It wasn't until hurricane Irene came rumbling through the area that I decided to finally tackle it. While everyone else was running to the store for milk and batteries, I was scrambling for coffee filters. 1000 of 'em. I can only imagine what the grocery store clerks thought I was going to do with all of them.



Once I had the coffee filters it was a simple process to make the light. I took a cheap paper light from Ikea and started gluing away with my glue gun.





And here's my helpful hint for this post: Don't burn yourself with the glue gun! It hurts! I may or may not have burned my fingers at least three times before learning this lesson...

Even though I had sequestered myself in the house while Irene made her way up the east coast (by the way - we saw very little of Irene where I live, thank goodness, so no damage here from the storm), she was long gone before I finished this project. It took forever. I knew that it would take a long time going into it, but holy moly it stretched out even longer than I had anticipated.

As surprising as it might sound, it takes a reeeeeeeeeeally long time to glue almost 1000 coffee filters to a light.



At first I had a hard time figuring out how to attach the coffee filters. If you roll them up into a cone you're left with a pointy tip at the end that isn't great for gluing. You really need a flat surface. And that's when I found my secret weapon to coffee filter gluing success: a pencil!



I put the flat part of the pencil in the center of the coffee filter and then wrapped the filter around the pencil. It left me with a great flat surface to put glue on so I could attach it to my paper light.



Slowly but surely, it started taking shape.



Because this project took such.a.long.time there were a lot of opportunities to second guess how this was going to turn out. And I did. I can't tell you how many times I thought this was a supreme waste of time and it would just look like some lame art project in the end. Thankfully (?) I have no life, so I kept plugging away at it despite my reservations.

And now I have this:



And even though Mr. T freaked me out by asking if any light would get through it because I was gluing the coffee filters so closely together, there's plenty of light when you turn it on. It gives off this really pretty glow.



If I'm being honest, the light is really too big for the guest bedroom (it looks more reasonably sized in the photos, but trust me, it's BIG). It hangs a smidge too low for comfort. But still, it's pretty freaking awesome there so it's going to stay for now. When we only have people walking through the house I'll leave this light up so I can show it off, but I'll switch it out to the more size appropriate light for when people actually stay over.





And I love how you see the light from outside of the doorway. There's no ignoring this thing!




p.s. As usual I'll be linking this project up to a bunch of great parties. Make sure you check out my Blog Parties page to check them all out.