The other day I got in two of these beautiful lamps at Gillyweed and thought they were pretty.... but unique??? No. I have been wanting to try out a project that my friend Niki and I saw last month at the Scott's Antique Market. These lamps were the perfect guinea pig!!! Custom lamp finials!! I mean look at the boring wood ball finial on the before shot. Definitely not unique.
So at Scott's this wonderful booth had bottle toppers and lamp finials made out of shells. The bottles were pretty costly and the finials were $20 each.... "You can so make that" Niki said.
I thought if I could figure out the toppers.. the lamp project below would definitely be next!
I started by bonding my oyster shells to the existing boring wood finials. I used Bondo which is an auto repair body filler. This is a very stinky 2 part epoxy that will glue anything together. Once the items are bonded, they can be sanded and painted.
For the next step, I dunked the wood ball finial and bottom of shell into a plaster mixture several times to build up the layers. I wanted to end result to look like coral. After that I sprinkled sand all over the wet plaster and let air dry.
What do you think?? Next time I think I might try Quickrete instead of the plaster. Using cement might let me eliminate the bondo step and give the overall finial a more aged look. In the meantime, these are perfect and certainly unique.
For your eye candy... here are some more great looking finials.
Enjoy!!
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