Friday Fun, With Coffee! #16 DIY Day!

Good morning everyone! What a morning it is too! The storm was a bit slow getting here, but it finally arrived last night and gave us about 6 inches (15cm) of new snow, and it is still snowing. Sigh. It really does look like winter all over again out there, just when it was finally starting to look like spring. Oh well.

This snow will melt over the next few days, although it is not supposed to get very warm until Tuesday. Even then it will still be below normal temperatures, but at least warmer than now. I do not plan to show any pics of this recent snow. I will admit, snow is not something I want to look at right now. The birds are having a hard time out there this morning too, but I am trying to keep seeds available for them.

So, on to our DIY for today. This is just something very simple to do if, like me, you have some antiques sitting around and would like to make use of them in some way. Today I will show what I did to a couple of stoneware items. Both ended up being nice lamps which fit in nicely with my decor of old stuff.

The first item, shown above, is a 2 gallon stoneware jug.

I did not have a large cork to use for this, which would work nicely, so I had to make my own, as you can see in the above pic. I cut a round piece for the top and used a rectangular piece of cedar for the bottom “cork”, which fit nice and tight into the opening of the jug.

Now, in the above photo, I used a lamp socket with a bottom side opening for the wire, rather than going up the bottom which would be normal, since I needed the wire to be on the outside of the jug.

You can get wire and add a plug on the end, shown above.

Or use an extension cord with the one end clipped off, then the plug is already attached nicely, as shown above, which is the method I used for this one.

How to attach the wires to the socket will not be shown, but you can check on YouTube if you are not familiar with how to do this part. There are lots of videos on the subject there to choose from. I am just mentioning what I did, not what you should do yourself, that is your choice. Then we see it attached to the stoneware jug in above photo.

Mine fit very nice and tight, but you can attach with glue or, better yet, use silicon sealant which can be removed more easily if you wish to do so at a later time.

Then I added an off white lamp shade to it and it is done, very simple indeed and it does not take long at all.

Then in the above photo I used a stoneware mustard jar which has a wide mouth top on it. Here I could use a larger piece of wood for the top and I used silicon sealant to hold it in place this time. Then I used a regular lamp socket and put the wire through the top and came up inside the bottom of the lamp socket as shown above. I did this part before attaching it to the stoneware jar.

In the above photo we see how it looks together.

Then in the above photo we see it with an off white lamp shade. I am thinking of covering the lamp shades with a light blue fabric, or perhaps blue and white gingham, just to give them a different look for a while. I like blue and my drapes in here are blue, so the lamp shades would then match.

Anyway, a quick, simple project to make some old items more practical as well as being nice and old. And when you do not have much space, like me, using things like this makes good sense too. Well, that is all for today, hope you enjoyed things. Have a fun Friday and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2023 Steve McLeod.