Upcycled Nightlight

Enjoying all things colourful and shiny, and with the recent arrival of 5 meters of el wire, my wife and I set about making something original, unique and most importantly, from what we could find in the kitchen cupboards.

You know, that cupboard we all have where items bought on the spur of the moment live for a longgg time..

So after much digging around and with a rope around my waist in case I got lost in there, I came out with a cheap Tesco basic's colander and a pack of coloured party bendy straws.

My wife took one look at the bits, grabbed them and ran off into our "maker cave" with a cunning plan !

Parts used :

Colander (plastic, easier to remove the handle) £2

Pack of coloured bendy straws 50p

5m el Wire (White, but has a blue hue to it)£6

First we needed to see which colour straws gave the best light, which am glad we did do as it showed that some colours were better than others...

We ended up using Pink, Yellow and Green.

Next we needed to get the handle off the colander, not wanting it to be too obvious what it was !

I used a dremel type machine and using eye protection cut the handles off and smoothed the surfaces

We made sure the holes in the colander were the right size for the straws to fit through, some needed dressing where they had not been properly formed when the colander was made.

Next we joined 2 straws together, which was a bit fiddly, but if you take your time they will go in and be a nice snug fit. We chose dual colours for each pair to break up the overall effect.

Now came the only boring part in the whole Make, counting and dividing the holes so we could get the straws evenly dispersed around the colander.

Armed with the information we started threading the el wire through from the inside of the colander through the straw, and back into the colander and continued this all the way.

Next, we aligned the straws as best we could and used hot glue to fix the straws in place.

We found we had around 400mm of el wire left over so threaded this through the center and used it to fix the crossover point of the straws in place.

The el-wire came with a small battery pack, which fit nicely inside the colander, with a 3 position switch which can be set to a steady light, slow flash or quick flashing.

The night light was a quick enjoyable and gratifying make, and am sure the kids will love it.

This is something with supervision, kids could make and enjoy..