"Howl" To: Easel Floor Lamp

You like that little play on words? Yeah, you do!

Anyway...I finished my lamp! It's at home in my office now and providing some great ambient light on this rainy, grey morning. I promised a friend of mine that I would post a "how to" for making this lamp. However, you may find that this is really a "how to not make a how to." I think I took only one picture during the actual process because I spent much of my time cursing the dang thing and looking at my dog for affirmation that I wasn't a completely useless imbecile. According to him, the jury's still out on that. Now to the good stuff!


How To Make An Easel Floor Lamp:
So, how did I make this floor lamp?* I will be as thorough and true to my process as possible.

Step 1: Search tirelessly through every antique and knick-knack shop in the county. Bloggers always make it seem soooo easy to just "happen upon" wonderfully in-tact antiques for their projects. I did not find this to be the case for this lamp.

Step 2: FINALLY find a painter's easel at an antique store! I had to go to the next town over to find this little baby. I wasn't even sure it was exactly what I wanted. I initially was searching for a tripod but Lord knows I didn't have $23490237 to drop on one and (for reasons unknown) I felt like using the internet was cheating. When I saw this easel sitting in the back of the store without a price tag, I decided I probably wouldn't find anything more suitable so it might as well be the one! I'm planning on recycling this approach in my search for a life partner.

"I don't like the way you're looking at me. What is your plan for that long, scary drill bit? 

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T HAVE A PLAN?!"

Step 3: Go shopping. Since I didn't know what would be serving as my base until I found it, I didn't know what materials I would need. Of course, I needed a lamp socket, wire, and a pipe to attach the socket to the base, but I wasn't sure what else. Lucky for me, I love shopping in home improvement stores (literally the only time I like to shop) and I found the other materials I needed which included more drill bits to fit the pipe and a level with a straight edge since I had to drill at quite an angle.

Step 4: Prepare the easel for its new life as a lamp base. After a long talk with the easel and some career counseling, it decided it was ready to take the plunge. I realized after bringing it home that it was going to be too tall with the shade on top to fit in my office comfortably, so I needed to find a way to adjust the height. This one only had one peg for the legs so I needed to drill holes into the inner legs to move the top half down a bit. This was incredibly easy, but you should take into account the space in which you will be using your lamp and how tall you want it to be.

       

You can see the original hole above where the wingnut is now. 

Step 5: Figure out how in the world you're going to attach the socket to a spindly, angled easel leg. This was certainly the most perplexing issue I had to deal with in this project. I had originally thought I would have to mount a wood block or something similar to the top of the easel, but that seemed so boring. Why make it easy? You are welcome to take that or another route. I decided to try to mount the socket to the back leg by drilling a hole at an awkward angle and screwing the pipe attachment into it. Despite myself, it actually worked pretty well. Confession: I have never had to drill at such a dramatic angle and I wasn't sure the wood would hold up. I ended up failing pretty badly at drilling the way I planned. But with some ingenuity and rigging, it worked out.

I plotted the angle by measuring how far up the socket needed to be for the brass piece to fit snuggly

in the space at the top of the easel. I then used the level with a straight edge to draw a line downward. 

The original angle that would have set the socket to be level rather than sticking out as you see

in the picture was much steeper than the hole I was able to drill. You live and you learn, right Alanis?

Yeah....see? I was fooled by the bloggers of the world that I would be good at this. Nope. Lucky for me, I was able to set the socket at an angle to make up for my drilling failure and secure it with the twist

tie that came with the lamp cord. Half Martha Stewart, half MacGyver, but fully functional!

The easel, now certain that it had put its future in the hands of a mad woman, had 

too much to drink and woke up spewing lamp cords.

Step 6: Fail at wiring the lamp socket approximately 17 times, choose a curse word, repeat it 5 or 6 times until you feel better, re-watch an episode of Breaking Bad, take your pup on a walk, and come back to it. Really, even more than figuring out how to attach the socket, this was so dang frustrating and needlessly so. You can find plenty of thorough walk-throughs for wiring a lamp on the Youtube. I had actually done this part before so I couldn't figure out why it took 3/4 of the total time I spent on this project failing miserably at it. At one point, I must have been pretty frustrated because in unscrewing the light bulb to try again, the bulb shattered in my grip. Poor light bulb. 

Eventually, I realized that the silver screw I had been attaching the neutral wire to was actually the wrong screw. *facepalm* Pro tip: this is if you're using a polarized socket (one in which the outlet you're using has uneven holes). After drilling the hole in my base, I attached the bottom of the lamp socket to the pipe, screwed that into the hole, then ran the wires up through the hole and pipe and wired it to the top half of the socket. Sounds fancy, but I did it successfully so it'll probably only take you one try. My proudest achievement of this project was how good I got at the underwriter's knot.

Step 7: Put it all together and bask in the glory of your mastery over light and physics! I was pretty darn proud of my final product. Sure, it's not perfect, but it works and that's all I could ask. I wanted the cord as out of the way as possible so I tucked it into the space between the two pieces of wood on the back leg and tightened the wingnut so that it held the chord. You may not find an easel with this same design. I would say that a staple gun, plastic cord mount, cable tie, old gum or whatever you need/find could serve the same purpose.

My super genius use of the easel leg. Chords came in white, brown, and clear-ish so

so you may want to consider the color of your base when choosing the cord.

The final product!

"I was once an abandoned old easel but now I am a proud beacon of triumph and rebirth!

And I am also still an easel!"

*******

So, there you have it. The worst "how to" maybe in the history of blogging, but I was winging it the whole time so what can you expect? I will say that I love the final product. It's clean, simple, and could still function as a fun way to display art. I also would recommend using a round drum shade like the one I had on hand. Shape-wise, it is versatile and will likely look good with any base you find. Happy DIYing!

*"easel-y!" There's your awful punch line for the day.