DIY Lamp Ideas: From Recycling Felt to Dip Dyed Shades

From designer toy lamps to creating your own mini township, here are the most creative DIY lamp ideas around.

Modifying Lamps

The Toy Lamp by Ryan McElhinney, seen in picture (1), is one incredible designer piece. Something similar can be made by taking old children’s toys and artfully glue gunning them to an existing lamp. For a great design try and choose paint colors that match or contrast the lamp well. Gold or Silver and black create a sleek modern design. For a more funky color scheme use bright bold colors: like yellow spray painted toys with an orange lamp. Light blue spray painted toys with a dark blue lamp.

The dip dyed DIY lamp shade by Design*Sponge is a simple project to do, but looks crazy great (2). For more home decor dip dying project ideas have a look at my mood board post here. Taking a Sharpie marker to a lamp is a creative and simple way of upcycling an old lamp (3) – by BHG. For more sharpie home DIY ideas, look here.

New Materials

How about using different materials to create your own homemade lamp. The organic flowing ribbon lamp by Sara Bergano is a bit of a complex DIY undertaking as it requires some soldering and wiring work. But by using scrap felt pieces and LED lights, Sara was able to create a lamp that is flexible and can be moulded to different shapes – and can be used as a floor, table, or even as a pendant lamp (4).

The DIY table lamp by Rob Edwards seen in picture (5) looks like it would be a complicated project, or something you could only buy at the store. But the process Rob used to create this is quite easy. The only major tool needed was a heat gun, which was used to bend the scrap acrylic to his liking. All that was left to do was to stick on the veneer and the IKEA LED lights.

Taking an IKEA FAX lamp shade, along with strips of teak wood, a few hardware pieces and concrete, Minni was able to create her own industrial style DIY desk lamp (6). Jump over to their site for the step by step guide.

DIY Paper Lamp Shade Ideas

Paper is a material that can be easily turned into a DIY lamp. Try and use LED lights for these projects as these will give off less heat.

Only a sheet of paper and simple cut and fold techniques were used to create the geometric origami style paper lamp in picture (7). You can follow along with Drew’s DIY guide here.

Another fun DIY lamp project is to use print outs of houses to create your own little lamp town – just like in picture (8), by Claire.

String Lights

String lights are inexpensive and flexible light fixtures. I’ve seen them stuffed in bird cages, and wine bottles (9 by Wit & Whistle) to create soft glowing lamps. Over on A Merry Mishap, string lights were weaved into a large rope to create a special kind of floor lamp (10).

For more DIY string light ideas have a look at these mood board posts: