<-- back to projects!

This crazy thing is my jellyfish lamp! At the moment, it sits dangling from the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, but one day it's going to be hung up sideways above whatever future couch I own.

Please kindly ignore that the picture is so bad. I have to wait til I can go back home to get a proper one!

Why'd you make it?

As joyous as the jellyfish lamp is, it kind of has really unhappy reasons for existing . I was having intense mdeical issues which led to extreme interpersonal issues, and I was trapped in a state of fight-or-flight for at least 6 straight weeks. I now know that people call that feeling... a panic attack! But somehow for 6 weeks (and the surrounding weeks where I was having a panic attack only most of the time rather than constantly), I had to figure out how to survive. The only thing that helped even a little bit was distraction.

And so I formulated the idea for a Big Project, one that would take up as much time as humanly possible. I kept coming up with more and more intricate details that would prolong the project and keep myself occupied. Thus the rainbow strings holding the panels of the head together (each one was individually cut and laced through the holes in the panels, I didn't have rainbow thread), the stars painted on the head of the jellyfish, the string of tiny paper cranes and beads, and the shrimp made of plastic straws. Anything that would take a long time and be a bit mind-numbing was included.

What's it made of? How'd you make it?

The head is made of cardboard: a ring of cardboard at the base with two arches of cardboard criss-crossing up from it to make a dome, then panels of cardboard in between the arches, fastened to them and the base ring with embroidery thread. I painted the cardboard with acrylic paint (rainbow on the outside, black on the inside). I cut out shapes in the panels to act as like a reverse shadow-puppet-- I was hoping that if I put lots of LEDs on the inside of the head that the light would stream out in a way that made shapes on the walls, but that doesn't really happen in practice .

The body is made primarily of tulle. If there's one thing I could change about this project, it would be MORE TULLE. I want the jellyfish to be wayyyyy fuller, but budget constraints could not allow this if I also wanted the jellyfish to be long. To attach the body to the head, I tied fishing line to the top of the arches, then I threaded the fishing line through a needle, bunched up lots of tulle into a big ball, and ran the fishing line through the tulle ball. To make the body thicker towards the head and thin out towards the tail, I would make several tulle balls and essentially "sew" them together by just running the line through two balls, and then circling back upwards to the top of the first ball and running the line back through that one, which would put the balls side by side. As I got closer to the tail I would only do one ball, then smaller and smaller bunches of tulle.

The details are several different materials. The lights are random, cheap, rainbow LED lights from Amazon. The iridescent, wavy strips near the head are... I'm not totally sure! But I saw a big roll of that pink-blue shiny material at the same craft store where I was buying the tulle and I knew it would be perfect for the jellyfish. The puffy parts that jut out are tissue paper, scrunched up in various ways to create the shape. Then there's a string of tiny paper cranes and pony beads that starts at the head and descends downwards in a spiral along the body. The final finishing touch (unless I ever pick this back up!) is surprisngly realistic looking shrimp, made of plastic straws, strewn around the body.

Lace background from this wonderful guide about border images in css.