My Little Sunshine: DIY woven lamps & cord art

Here's a peek into how we made the woven hanging lamp in our nursery :)

I found this DIY on Poppytalk blog and followed it with a few minor tweaks.

I purchased 2 sets of iron on wood veneer strips from Lowes. They are typically used on the edges of shelving. Unrolling each set, I painted the strips a muted yellow to match our room. You could leave them as they are (a white ash sort of wood color), stain them, paint them, whatever works for your space!

I used one set of strips per light, and fired up the hot glue gun. I found this to be an easier & quicker option than regular old glue & because of the iron on properties of this particular veneer, I thought the heat from the glue would work in my advantage for extra stick-age ;)

To start the structure of my lamp, I cut a portion of one of the strips, and glued the two ends together, making a circle. This first circle formed the base for the rest of my lamp. I continued to cut strips and criss-cross circles around each other, gluing them together as I went.

For the remainder of the lamp making process, I followed the directions on Poppytalk.

Once we finished making the lamps & hung them from the ceiling over the bed, we came across the issue of what to do with the cords we had dangling overhead. Ben decided we should make them into some kind of design on the wall & I came up with the idea to make them look like a faux headboard, as the bed currently had none.

We started with the first cord & honestly just eyeballed the design on the first side. Ben started at the top, pulling tightly on the cord as he hammered small brackets over the cord to hold it in shape. We hammered in about three brackets on the straight line that goes from the ceiling to where the design starts, then hammered in a bracket at each corner of the design. The most important part of this process, is keeping the cord tight. Otherwise your design will be all loosey goosey and won't have the desired effect.

In order to mirror the design that we created with the first cord, we measured each portion of the first design & implemented the same measurements on the opposite side.

The final step in this design process, was to allow gravity to work on the dangling portion of the cord, that went from the ceiling to the actual lamp. Our wall design was so sharp & crisp, that it looked a little funny to have slightly crinkled lamp cords (see picture above). In order to speed up this process, we hung weights from each lamp overnight. This seemed to do the trick & by morning we had much straighter lamp cords!