Nov 16, 2010
By New England Design and Construction
Design Tip of the day! Utilizing old light bulbs for the Holidays.
Whenever a light bulb burns out. Save them! Don’t throw them away in the trash! They may seem useless now, but come Holiday time, you can transform these useless things into something beautiful and elegant. There are so many little Christmas projects you can do with recycled materials. Something easy to use is recycled light bulbs. You can hang them on the tree and do your own ornaments!
My favorite one to make is painting the Grinch and doing other kind of figurines and characters onto them. It really helps bring out the tree and it’s not hard or expensive to do at all. Besides painting your own designs onto the light bulb you can also fill them with greenery inside to give it some more natural look to it! It’s very simple and quick to do. Here’s how!
For Materials you will need
- The light bulb
- Newspaper
- Various color of paint depending on what you wish to make
- Glue/flour
- Hot glue gun
- Colored papers.
To prepare the light bulb for paint you’ll have to paper mache it and cover it with newspaper. The reason you want to cover it is because it makes the painting a whole lot easier. To make paper mache paste, you have to mix flour and water until you get a thick paste. One you make the paper mache, apply the newspaper evenly. Take you’re time. You want it to be smooth and let the glue dry evenly. You don’t want ridges and bumps all over the place when you go and paint
To make something easy as your first one, you can make a reindeer!
- Paint the entire bulb brown.
- Use wiggly eyes or draw your own eyes
- Then use some kind of soft red cotton ball or bunched up red yarn for the nose.
- For Antlers you can just simply cut out brown paper bag shaped as antlers or you can go that extra step for more of a realistic approach and use something solid like branches and sticks.
- Once you’re done, you can just take a small piece of ribbon and hot glue it onto the top for a hanger.
Besides making them into ornaments I love using old light bulbs to decorate my staircase. I usually tie a medium sized bow with left over red ribbon and glue it onto the middle. Once that dries, I use green ,red, and white yarn/ pipe cleaner and wrap it and make some kind of funky design onto the light bulb and then hang it on my staircase alone with the garland and reefs. You can do lots of other designs to make it more festive!
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