BLANDA ceiling lamp

Materials: BLANDA BLANK 36 cm serving bowl, masking tape, hand drill, spray paint, magnets, tons of patience

Description: For the past six years I've just had a bare bulb in the ceiling of my bedroom, so when I repainted it this winter I decided I wanted to cover it up once and for all.

None of the lamp shades I could find in shops were quite what I wanted though, so I decided to make my own from a BLANDA bowl.

Step 1: Using masking tape, mark up points evenly spaced around the bowl. Place them how you like, I did them in rays going out from the center. Use whatever tools you need to get them in the right place, if I had had access to a turntable I would have used that.

Step 2: Start drilling! 225 holes in total for my design.I used a 5mm metal drill bit in a battery powered machine. The battery only lasted for about 20 or so holes before I had to recharge for a few hours, so the frequent pauses helped me not get bored of the job too soon. The masking tape also helps with keeping the drill from sliding around.

Step 3: After drilling and peeling away the masking tape, I went over the inside with a pair of pliers and picked off any metal filings stuck to the hole edges. I then sanded the outside using a very coarse grain sanding block, to get the hole edges so smooth as possible.

Step 4: Mask off the inside of the holes so paint won't leak through to the inside. Spray paint the bowl! I used a high gloss red for mine, and I'm satisfied after two coats. Could probably have been better with several more thinner coats though.

Step 5: The lamp is finished, so now is the time to figure out a clever way to hang it to your light fixture.

I experimented with lots of things like super glue and metal rods, but in the end I came up with a solution involving magnets.

I securely fixed three metal wires to the ceiling fixture and attached super-strong neodymium magnets to the ends. Then it was just a matter of clicking the finished bowl up to the magnets. Adjusting positioning and height was easy since the magnets can slide around and attach anywhere on the inside.

Drilling the holes was a serious chore, and it was a grueling two week project, but now that it's done I'm very pleased with the end results! It casts some really neat patterns on the ceiling around it.

If I could do anything different it would be to coat the inside with some sort of gold or copper paint or similar, to give all the reflected light a warmer tone, but that will have to wait for some other hack.

~ Christian G, Sweden