Geek Lamp 2: Electric Boogaloo

After I made my own geekiest lamp in all of geekdom a friend of mine (the very friend who lent me his Enterprise D blueprints) commissioned me to make him a table lamp with an Enterprise design. Took me ages to find a lamp I could customise and then ages again to actually decide which bit of the ship to put on it, but I really like what I ended up with, so maybe all that time was worth it! Here's how it turned out:

The lamp is made of a white metal back and base, with a sort of plastic-backed fabric shade that curves around the base piece. It's perhaps 45cm tall and about 30cm wide. I half traced, half free handed the design onto the plastic back of the fabric piece with a black sharpie.



I love how the saucer section curves off this side of the lamp:



But I'm less happy with how the nacelle curves away on this side. It's the one thing I'd change if I were to do it again- I'd reposition the design so that the nacelle starts round on the front of the lamp.



Some close ups!




This isn't the greatest pic of this part but I'm rather proud of how the lettering came out - it was quite tricky doing letters backwards (cos I'm drawing everything on the "inside" of the lamp) but they look pretty neat. I actually used Neil's signature forging trick from White Collar and did all the lettering upside down so I wasn't thinking about the letters as letters but just as a pattern of lines I had to follow. That worked out quite nicely for me!



The benefit of doing the design on the back of the shade was that the lamp is stealthily geeky - when it's switched off it just looks like a plain yellow lamp, which is, oddly, my favourite thing about it!



Taking a picture with a flash when the lamp is on:




And a pic of the lit lamp in a dark room!



More pics of the lamp here. .