9 Creative Lighting Projects for Your Home

And then there was light. Boring old switches and fittings don’t really do it right, do they? This single lampshade is pretty boring, but there’s so much more you can do, from decorating a lampshade to lighting up an entire room with a starfield effect, and more.

We’ve put together nine inspiring DIY lighting projects that you can use or adapt for your home. I think you will agree, the results are amazing.

Lights in a bottle

Recycling used glass bottles is without a doubt the best way to recycle after dinner, but melting down and reusing a glass isn’t necessarily the best answer: recycle them instead!

aya-diy lighting-winebottle

Hold bottles, drill holes in every thing filled with Christmas lights? The results are sure to impress and enhance the atmosphere of rooms of all sizes. Follow the steps below to create your own wine bottle lights. You can even expand on this idea, perhaps using an Arduino, and some colored RGB LEDs display helpful notifications.

Create a galaxy on your ceiling

Kids love looking at the night sky and pointing at the stars, so why not bring them closer?

This example uses fiber optics and when combined with a remote controlled fiber optic illuminator you can get great results with different brightness and colors. This requires a lot of work with a drill and a trip to the attic (or room above), but you can forgo that in favor of a large black sheet with holes for fiber optics.

Set the mood with DIY Ambilight

Here’s a great lighting project you can install for less than $30 — a lighting system that enhances your media center by reflecting the dominant color of the movie or TV show you’re currently watching. As with the wine bottle project above (and, to some extent, any lighting project), using fixtures in this way will change the ambiance of your TV or computer viewing area.

James Bruce from demonstrated how dynamic ambient lighting works with a media center. playing music, but the effect is as striking with Hollywood movies and cinematic TV shows as » Doctor Who, or Game of Thrones

More recently, James has created a more sophisticated DIY version of Ambilight. with NeoPixels, which he showcased with a YouTube psych trance ride.

With this build, you get the benefit of using the better shape of the RGB LED strip and more accurate color reproduction around the edges, but both types can be useful, depending on how closely you plan to stick to the instructions or adapt them to something more suited to your needs. goals.

Reflecting on Infinity and Beyond

Also included with the LED downlight is an amazing infinity mirror that requires an old frame or even a whole mirror, a lot of woodwork (refer to these YouTube channels for woodworking help) and an IR sensor to activate the LEDs when someone is present.

Aya-DIY lighting mirror

Instead of using a standard mirror, the project uses double-sided mirrored glass, so while a small infinity mirror can be a relatively inexpensive design, the greater variety seen here and explained in this tutorial is likely to be quite expensive and set you back. $100.

Light up the rain

Take on your DIY lighting projects with this instructive walkthrough of the steps required to build an electric light umbrella!

Aya-DIY Lighting Umbrella

The project calls for 64 surface mount LEDs and a simple umbrella (preferably with a hollow shaft and no spring release) and uses a compact control box to turn the lights on and off. The results are amazing and you will definitely stand out!

Amazing colorful lights with bounce

As you may have noticed from the suggestions in this list, the beauty of LEDs lies in their tremendous flexibility. This is thanks to their compact size, and in this DIY project, Christmas light lighting is fed into multiple ping-pong balls (144 balls for about $10 on eBay), creating a range of fun, bright, diffused lights.

led ping pong lights

With the help of a drill and a hot glue gun to hold the light in place, this is one of the easiest yet most effective builds on the list.

atmospheric cloud lamp

Clouds don’t usually light up, do they? Well, yes, they do. During the day, the clouds are illuminated by the sun, the light is reflected from them on sunny days and absorbed into the gray clouds on cloudy days. And who can forget how a flash of lightning illuminates the surrounding clouds during a storm?

This excellent cloud lamp cloud lamp cloud lamp — again demonstrated by James Bruce from — shows how you can do this for about $100.

Please note that the build includes two Arduinos and requires a bit of Jigsaw work on MDF.

The results, however, speak for themselves!

Stunning cityscape lampshade

If you’re looking for simplicity, why not look at what you already have and adapt it? When using an LED lamp (or even a standard one), all you need is black acrylic paint to cover the lampshade inside and out, a city skyline landmark (or whatever image you like), and a map icon.

aya-diy lighting lamp