Lampshades for the Yard

I have no great fondness for ready made downlighting fittings as the really good ones are too expensive if they are available at all, or those that are easily available ones are too crude and ugly.  I prefer the open type.  I needed one for the garden side yard and one for the front gate.  Both of these were made at different times using different things.

The earlier project was for the garden.  The light has to be in the open and it should be taking rain and wind also. I took an old unusable steel vessel lying idle. In fact, these ugly items are gifts given by someone during some marriage or some of their family function, which is a tradition.  For the sake of tradition, such cheap gifts are distributed and they are usually useless items. So I picked up one such among many lying there in a bag for my lampshade project.  I wanted to 'unjunk' it!

Since the light bulb had to be protected from rain, I made a hole in the bottom for the wire to pass, also through a plastic lid to prevent rainwater from seeping through the wire into the bulb connection inside the holder. It worked well when I did this simple project.

The other lampshade I made was about a year after I made the above.  This was a bit trickier, because it had to be hung some distance away from the taper design of the huge gate pillar so that light would get distributed without producing the shadow of the huge cornice of that pillar.  

There were a few ceramic coated vintage iron shades lying in a box. I picked up one of them.  Now, the tricky part. To hang it without using a nail.  I had a junked base of an old table lamp. I used a PVC water pipe and elbow [as PVC can take all weather and also be water tight] for the wire casing. The spring of the table lamp fitted into this PVC pipe also, much to my delight!  I just ran a wire around the top of the pillar, added the lamp base to it and tied the wire securely.  

See that light near the right edge of the frame. This was taken when our Night blooming Cereus was open [last August].

It has been so far good at the rain, but have to see how much swaying in the wind it can handle before the electric wire gets snapped behind the bulb holder. So far so good, almost two years on.