10 Ways to Change a Lightbulb

Create your own DIY lighting around a LED light bulb hanging on a wire. This resourceful video from The Lighting Channel shares 10 ways to change a lightbulb: with paper, crochet, a bottle, a bowl, paper mâché, ducting tube, stencils, a metal utensil can, a pentagon tower made with construction paper, and a soft box.

Remember to use LED lights for safety—they don’t burn as hot as other kinds of light bulbs—and give them lots of room to breathe. As always, be safe, be smart, be sure to test your creations, and don’t leave them unattended. And for an up close look at these ideas, check out this playlist. Here are two we want to try:

The Pentagon Tower: We decided on a dark cardboard to highlight the light coming through the cracks, you could consider a range of opaque to translucent materials to create a variety of qualities for this light as an object and how much it lights your space. Essentially opaque will give you a dark object with defined shadows on the surrounding walls, and translucent will give you a glowing object with brighter and darker spots on the walls.

We chose the pentagon, however this principle can be built with triangles, squares, hexagons, heptagons and up! Likewise, the size of the lamp is completely variable, depending on how you want to use it. The one really important trick is to find where the notch marks will be, so that each section snaps nicely into place. For the pentagon the notches are at 25% and 75% of each length (in our case we had ca 12cm long sections, so notches were at 3cm and 9cm).

With Papermáche: …as long as the doilies encompassed the entire balloon, they slowly pressed the air out while drying, creating a strange and almost cloud like form. Since this worked predictably after a couple of trials we decided to share the idea.

If, however, you only half cover the balloon it will hold its shape and you will get a larger, rounder, smoother and more delicate half sphere.

As a rule of thumb the mixture should be 1 part flour to 1 part water. It should be nice and thick for a strong end product, but not lumpy. Make sure to run the paper through your fingers to get rid of excess paste, or try painting the paste on with a brush. Remember to salt your paper mache mix, it keeps it from molding!

It is best to let it dry over night, and be careful when removing the depleted balloon so that nothing tears. Make sure to attach the sphere to the cord and not directly to the bulb, it could burn.