Sunday, October 22, 2006

Fiber Optic Light Project

It began with seeing a tacky baseball hat with an embroidered american flag on it which had fiber optic lights hidden it it and a switch inside which one would turn on to make it light up.

hats/fiber-optic-american-flag-hat-big.gif


Tacky tacky tacky.

Yet I picked up the hat and looked inside and thought "Hey, if you can thread fiber optics into a hat, why not clay projects or whatnot?"

I found some kits on the internet (which included the light source and the cable) and began playing with lights in clay. My first attempt was pretty poor and I'm not going to share it here until I figure out how to present it better.

But this poster came out much better.

I saw the original poster at a thrift store and knew it was perfect.



Initially I thought I'd keep the frame and mat but the frame had no glass or plastic front and the mat was stained pretty badly.




So I bought a poster frame at the Wal-Mart and used some scrapbook paper for background (instead of using a mat).

Then I started adding the light fibers.



All in all I think it came out looking pretty cool.



You can hang it on your wall and never know it has any lights in it until you turn it on.



I'm giving it to one of my bosses at work who is from New York (shout-out to L Rod!). I'm sure she'll at least be gracious if she hates it!


~~~
get your own tacky American Flag hat (but why bother?)

3 comments:

John Cowart said...

That's a cool project.

You display real genius in combining the two diverse elements here.

Jas said...

That is pretty cool. Congrats on finding the lights.

Go towards the lights!

Lindsey said...

OMG, I love it, that is AWESOME. I would have so much fun turning that on at night in my house.....very cool project!! You go boy!