DIY Knotted Rope Table Lamp!

Hello! I have recently started reading a book (I usually don't read much) about the universe and its quite interesting. Sometimes I even read at night. While sleeping, I share the same room with my brother and he feels difficulty in sleeping with lights on. So I wanted to buy a desk lamp to do the reading during night time. While searching online for a desk lamp, I found a very interesting twisted rope desk lamp, but the price was extremely high. Rs. 7700 (109 USD) just for a small lamp! So in this instructable, I am going to build the same lamp at home and trust me, you will be amazed on how good it looks. Lets get making!

Materials required:

1. Jute rope (Lots of it)

2. Aluminium wire

3. A pendent bulb holder

4. Yellow/orange night bilb

5. OHP sheet (or any transparent sheet)

6. Sand paper

7. other stuff like glue, scissors, cutter...

First get a wire that has a mains plug. Make sure there are no cuts. If the other end has some connector, cut it off and expose the two bare wires inside. Remove the enamel from those wires and get ready for some hard work!

Take a long aluminium wire, mine is enameled and I would suggest using the same. Take a very long jute rope and start winding it around the aluminium wire tightly. Make sure you cover quite a long portion of it. Its a tedious task but this will decide the overall appearance of your lamp, so be patient while doing this. After your'e done, tie the rope to the aluminium wire at the two ends to avoid unwinding. Observe that I have fed the electric wire inside the winding (i.e I wound the rope around it) half way through. This is to make the final result look neat and avoid any hanging cables. This is why I mentioned that enameled aluminium wire is better.

This was the hardest and the most time consuming step for me.

Here's the fun part. Grab the wound rope and make a knot a little above midway. Make sure the knot is not too small (i.e. not too tight) and take care that the part where the electric wire is present is not involved in the knot. This is to keep the wire away from any tension or force. It took me a few tries, but finally I was able to get a good looking knot. The base can be made by just making a loop from the major part of the rope. You can get creative and make any design you like. I was happy with the knot starting just above the base.

After I was happy, I dropped a few blobs of adhesive here and there to make sure everything stays in place.

Connect the two wires to the bulb holder and just push the bottom hole of the holder to the end of the winding. It should easily create a tight fit. In case the hole is too big, stick a little electrical tape to the top of the winding (to the protruding aluminium wire).

I would suggest buying a shade online but at present, I am going to make a shade myself.

We will make the shade using OHP sheet. We need to get rid of the transparency of the sheet and make it semi transparent. To do this, just take a sand paper and sand the OHP sheet. Keep on doing this all over it. Once the sheet looks a little opaque, turn it over and sand the other side too. I know it is time consuming and a little hard thing to do. But this will produce a great effect after done.

I simply made a cylinder out of the sheet and stuck two aluminium rings, one at the top and one in the bottom of the cylinder. I then made a small extension in the bottom ring which was used to fix the shade to the wound rope.

Just fix a night bulb to the lamp holder and plug it to the mains! Look how beautiful it looks. My camera couldn't focus properly on the shade which concentrated the light to the center, but in real, the light is well dispersed in the shade. This project was very cheap, no where close to how much the online product costs. I actually planned on using a yellow light, but for now red looks good. If I would have to change anything, I will replace the shade. Probably I will buy a shade.

Thank you for viewing my i'ble and I hope you will enjoy building it as much as I did!