DIY photo lamp

Ok. So J and I spontaneously bought this ugly lamp

for literally a couple bucks at a Good Will one day. Like 2 years ago. (FYI I have seen similar lamps for cheap at various stores) We thought it would be cool to make one of those lamps out of photo negatives( like this one)  and we figured that we could dedicate it to our pups. Well we were both busy with school and it just kind of sat in a room untouched for a few years. When we moved J wanted to throw it away because we never did anything with it. But I really really wanted to make our lamp. So I said that if we didn't do anything with it by the end of the month we could throw it away. Obviously I waited like 28 days and then got to researching.

So it turns out that it's almost impossible for a regular person to make photo negatives from digital photos. I thought there would be some service online or something. Nope. Not so. And since we don't even own a camera with film this option seemed out of the question. On to plan B. We thought maybe we could print out pictures on transparent paper and that could work. Transparent paper that you can use on a laser printer is harder to come by then you think. We could buy a huge pack of it online but I didn't really want a huge pack of it when we only needed 4 sheets. Off to Michael's we went. Sure enough, we couldn't find any true transparent paper. BUT. We did find this silver-ish paper that was sort of transparent. Since this was the closest thing to transparent paper we thought we'd give it a try. Well, it actually worked. It printed out perfectly, you can see the pictures clearly, and light does shine through. So here's how we did it.

First things first, I measured each side of the lamp to find out how big the pictures needed to be. Then I found pictures of our pups and put together 4 collages using the dimensions. I used MS Powerpoint because I fail at photoshop (that is J's arena), but you can use whatever your comfortable with! My collages looked like this:

Only 3 are shown here, but there are 4 total

Next, take apart the lamp.

I'm not sure if all these types of lamps will be like this, but we just had to take the bottom and top pieces of wood out and the rest of the lamp just came apart.

This was my least favorite part. We had to cut through the existing paper on the lamp, which was surprisingly thick and sort of like felt, so even after cutting it off the edges looked frayed. Oh and we just used a box cutter. Like this:

You can't really tell but the edges are all frayed and would be sticking out if I just glued on the new collages over it. Not cute. So I used tweezers and sand paper to make it look cleaner:

On the very last side J decided to change the blade on the box cutter. We should have done this first. It made all the difference and we didn't even have to do anything to the last one, it was just ready to glue over after we cut off the felt paper.

Anyways, now we're ready to go:

You can't really see this again. I should really double check my pictures before I put my phone away. I used clear craft glue and just made a thick line down each edge. Then I just took my collages (which I trimmed to the right dimensions) and laid one on top of the glue. I had to go through and push down the picture along each edge to make sure that it was making contact with the glue. Using my nail was the easiest way to do this. And then let it dry! I also had to come back while they were drying and press down edges that were popping up again. 

Once dried we put the lamp back together:

And here's the final lamp all lit up. 

                                     

Overall I'm really happy about how this came out and we love it with the pics of our pups! 

Well, that's all for now!