Crane Lamp - Success!

So, when I say I abandoned my origami crane lampshade, I mean I abandoned that design, not the concept as a whole. I was really tempted to scrap the whole idea, and after staring at a pile of little paper birds for two months I was ready to throw in the towel. However... one never outgrows one's parents' philosophies (no matter how hard one might try!) and I learned from my dad that "anything worth doing is worth doing well", and "if you start smething, finish it", so I reluctantly kept working on it. And, hey, I'm glad I did, because it ended up looking like this:

which I like about a million times better than the original idea :)

This is basically a bunch of paper cranes glued to a Pandora lamp that I picked up at B&Q (with this project in mind) in one of their fabulous sales. When I got it home I discovered the reason for the reduced price - a standard lightbulb is taller than the height of the globe! So there was this gap underneath the shade where it doesn't sit flush with the lampbase:

Needless to say, I was pretty unimpressed. Until I discovered that I could slot a crane's tail underneath the shade and it would just sit nicely in the gap like so:

I just put a little dot of UHU glue - the clear liquid stuff, not the sticks - on the tail to hold it in place.

Oh -- it's probably worth mentioning that I put an energy-saving bulb in this lamp, so it never gets real hot. This also means that the bulb should last about 10 years, which is good because the shade's awkward to remove once it's covered in cranes.

Essentially then you just glue a whole bunch more cranes all over the shades at various angles. I found it easiest to work from the bottom up in "rows". Don't make the rows too neat; you want it looking kind of haphazard. About halfway through, mine looked like this:

I found this to be quite a time-consuming project. The glue was great, in that it dried really fast and held everything well. But it was time-consuming to figure out how to place each bird to get the amount of disarray I wanted without it looking like total chaos. In all, including making the birds, it probably took about 4 or 5 hours, but it was totally worth it :)