I! Have Made Lamp!
One of my goals for the year was to decorate my apartment. I’ve failed miserably by doing nothing. My apartment is nice but it’s fairly sterile. This is mostly because when I moved here, I was in the throes of a depression that, well, lingers. I kind of don’t care. But! I kind of do.
Yesterday, I was downtown and I drive by a store and in the corner of my eye…wait, I mean, “downtown,” and in the corner of my eye I saw a chic boutique and I thought MIRAGE!!! I swung back around and realized there is a nice antique shop with lots of mid-century stuff. I went in with a sense of awe and wonder. “What is this place?” I whispered, gently touching the fine antique objects around me. If I was having a dream, I had no interest in waking up. It was simply delightful.
That’s where I got my one “n.” I also bought an aquamarine stool with red trim (????), an orange suitcase (????), an antique tanning lamp, and this wire shelf thing, shelf thing being the technical term.
The lamp even came with these bizarre tanning glasses for someone with a shrunken head. I then decided, I am going to get crafty on this motherfucker.
I went to the hardware store, immediately descended into a mild panic because I think of the hardware store as a man place (I know!) and want no part of it. I pulled myself together and bought sandpaper, paint, other things, and a lightbulb. Some of the materials are for another project, painting the wire shelf thing, but I looked at the lamp and decided I would make a desk lamp for work and I would paint it the best color in the world—pink.
This is the before photo. I put tape over the lightbulb vagina, that’s what I call it anyway, to protect it. I felt like that was necessary. Then I sanded off the rust, and went nuts spray painting the lamp. On my dining room table! Worry not, I used a tarp. Then I admired my handiwork feeling smug as hell for, well, hours. Then I remembered these adorable, TINY pails I bought at Target (Nirvana) with a tiny chalkboard on the front so I clipped the lamp to the tiny pail and wrote LAMP on the tiny chalkboard and now I have an amazing pink tiny pail lamp and still terrible handwriting.
This is how I felt after accomplishing what is an absurdly easy task but that for me, not the most crafty of ladies, felt heroic:
Only I was wearing a shirt.
