String Pendant Lamp

Last Updated on April 2, 2021 by teamobn

String Pendant Lamp – continued

Wrap the balloon with the saturated thread trying to keep good tension the whole time. You want the thread to make loops around the largest circumference on the balloon as possible.

Once you’ve worked in one area a bit, move on to another. You’re trying to get an even covering of string around the balloon.

Once the balloon has been complete wrapped with as much thread as you like (our small, less dense globes used around 150 yards of thread while our larger more denser globes used around 300 yards of thread), take out the slip knot that you previously tied and blow the balloon up as much as you can. Big cheeks and diaphragm everyone!

The balloon has a tendency to shrink as the fabric stiffener dries, so we want to fill it up as much as possible to keep things from getting wrinkly and sagging over the 24-hour drying process.

Dry the wrapped balloon for 24 hours in a temperature stable environment. I placed some garbage bags down in my bathtub to protect against drips and hung the globes from some extra crochet thread.

Hot air expands, so heat = a tight balloon. I cranked up my electric heater and put a small fan in there too to circulate the air. This method worked well.

I’m pretty adamant about the importance of this step and here’s why…the first two globes that I made just dried in my living room, and throughout the course of the night (cold), next day (warmer) and then night (cold) when they were finally dry, the balloon had changed volumes multiple times and distorted the sphere significantly.

Once the fabric stiffener is dry, remove the balloon from inside the string prison.

First, pop the balloon with a pin. If you’re lucky, it will naturally start to shrink away from the string. If not, you’ve got to start poking at it with a long object. We used a screwdriver. Bit by bit it will come away from the string and pretty soon it will come completely free.

Cut the strings around the top that are holding it in place and pull it out.

Cut a whole in the top of the globe with a scissors so that there’s enough space to insert the bulb and the light fixture.

You’ve got to create some kind of stopper to hold the globe in place on the fixture.

The easiest thing we came up with was to drill a small hole in the little plastic thing that manages the cable on the Ikea lamp and use some fishing line to tie the plastic cable manager to the top of the globe.

You can also use some bailing wire that’s been wrapped around the cord and then bent out into two little prongs to hold up the globe. This is the method that is shown in the video. There are probably many different ways to attach the globe to the fixture.