A little bit of purple, a little bit of glamour-puss

As my previous dream post involved the color purple and its meaning of creativity in my life, there is no better way to show your creative side than making something.  Last weeked I spent some time with my wonderful other half, making a rather creative lamp and re-using pieces so it's a bit green too!

My girl came up with the idea by looking at some website. While I had been trying to decide what lamp to get for my own apartment, it was decided it would be way more fun to make our own.  Sarah has a strange passion for mason jars and I absolutely love bicycles.  What better way to combine these two items than building a chandelier for the dinner table?

The Components!

The first step in the project was to really find a good layout for the design and after spending time trying to get the framework down, I came to the realization that an old bicycle rim would be a good piece to use (After we walked through one of those home improvement stores for about an hour trying to find something useful there). 

Once we went back to her place we had ourselves a mini date as we biked through downtown Minneapolis to the great store of One on One Bike.  Inside the basement there is a wonderful bicyle graveyard in which you can find old, used parts for virtually any style or size of bike. And for those on a budget, its cheap!  The two rims were a grand total of 3$.  Now that we had all of the pieces for the lamp, we spent time learning how to wire properly and worked to remember the laws of physics and electricity.

Confirming suspicion on wiring methods.

Once I discovered the proper way to wire the lamp I got things setup and started threading through the rims after drilling the holes a bit bigger so the wire would fit through.  Also, just to protect the wire against the sharp metal edges we placed rubber grommets in the enlarged holes.  Getting the wire through the grommets was almost of job of its own, but after it was complete the final product came to "light."

Threading the wire. Almost complete.

After making a silly mistake and not creating a full circuit, the light finally worked after repairing what I had initially done in slight error. And  it looks pretty good!  It was a really neat project and pretty cheap too; somewhere around 50$ for all of the parts.  The best part was getting to use things that are unique, and stylish. Oh yeah, and creating something while spending time with my girl is cool too!

The final product.

P.S. I still don't understand this glamour-puss term but apparently its the cool thing to say now when you create something fashionable out of old junk.  I always thought that was just being creative.