Negative to Positive: Ikea Lamp Hack
If you are wondering what to do with boxes or drawers overflowing with old film negatives, this clever IKEA hack project takes care of them while giving your home a bit of personalized mood lighting.
The project, from Claire Chauvin of Poopscape, uses the ubiquitous (amongst IKEA lovers, anyway) IKEA Grönö lamp. All you need is one of the under-$10 lamps, some Mod Podge or other decoupage glue, and a bunch of your old film negatives and you’ve got a one-of-a-kind DIY lamp that people will want to examine up close.
The negatives should be easy enough to find if you’re a memory hoarder like most of us. With almost everyone using digital photography these days, most of those old negatives have been relegated to storage because you can’t bear to part with them – they are reminders of special times, after all.
Before starting the project, you should definitely convert your negatives to digital so you can always hold onto the images. Then, follow the detailed instructions over at Poopscape to create your own one-of-a-kind photo negative lamp.
The finished project is truly stunning. The light shining through the negative strips brings the images to life and calls to mind old movie projectors and photography studios. If you’re going to make any photo negative crafts, this might be the coolest one around.
“Ikea- the very name can either make someone grimace or groan with pleasure. Me? I couldn’t do without it. Cheap? Yes. Cheaply made? Probably, yes. I know it’s not heirloom quality stuff, but to me that means that I can mess around with Ikea products to customize them (aka “Ikea hack“) without feeling worried about the cost of my “experiment”. The Grönö lamp is an Ikea staple, it’s inexpensive ($6.99!), made of frosted glass (not plastic) and BEGS to be messed with. A blank canvas, if you will, and I decided to make a nice light fixture for my photo classroom (now gone totally digital) by covering it with black and white negatives- a respectful nod to the past.”
Head over to Poopscape for the full, detailed instructions on making your very own film negative lamp.
