Jar Lights

The lighting is now going up in our extension, so far the bedroom and stairs have their jars hanging and looking beautiful. Do you remember I started out with these jars and a helpful electrician?

I had a slight problem with some of the jars - the ones that had glass discs in their lids rather than rusty metal discs.

Since we needed to drill holes in the lids (to get the light bulbs through) the glass discs were no good. But after a bit of experimenting I discovered that I could cut down the lid of a tin of tuna (just with ordinary kitchen scissors) to the right size to replace the glass disc, and that was something we could drill through.

I think we may all get fed up with tuna sandwiches now though! After that, it was just a matter of the electrician working his magic, and this is what we've got hanging now:

I wish you could all come and see them in person, because it really is hard to do them justice in a photo. There are 5 lights like these over the stairs and in the bedroom, and since the ceilings are very high they're all dangling down a long way. Here's an attempt at what they look like when they're off:

But I think they look best on, and they cast lovely shadows on the walls, especially as some of the jars have patterns in the glass.

 

And do you remember that one big jar in the photo at the top? Here's that one:

And off:

 

Sometimes things turn out just as you hope, and this was one of those times. There are lots of examples of this type of lighting across the web, some with useful tutorials. If you're interested in finding out more about them then have a look on my Pinterest - Lighting Board. I collected lots of tutorials and pictures on there and then sent the link to my electrician to see if he could duplicate them for me. If you'd just like to buy something along these lines, then have a look at this Etsy shop - BootsNGus. They have some gorgeous lights for sale. Unfortunately, given the number of lights I needed and the fact that postage and Import Taxes would be high (from America), there was no way I could go down that route. But I did buy the ceiling fittings from there (details on Pinterest) - we needed extra strong ones to take the weight of the jars and this was the only place I could find them.

There are still jar bedside lights to finish and a jar light fitting in the conservatory - hopefully they might be done for me to show you early next week.

Back tomorrow with a photo, Sally.