Hello everyone, join me for another interesting DIY project!
It's been a while since I did anything crafty and this project would be literally impossible without the help of my husband 
The DIY project for today is a lamp, made in a shape of a cloud, for our nursery. I think it came out perfect, just the way we imagined it - fluffy, interactive and fairy-tale like! It would look great in any room, it gives it a certain amount of dream and ethereal feeling, right?
Once the idea came in to place, we started gathering the material we needed. One of the first things you will need is a big (5L) water bottle, so drink up! This was the structural part of our cloud. In that bottle we fitted all the electronics parts and LED's mounted on the straws.
LED's we used are addressable, so each of them can be controlled separately. That allowed us to create nice lightning effects and the fact that they were on the end of straws meant that light will be evenly distributed through out the cloud.
All LED's should be soldered together using serial connection, so that data line goes from one LED to another. Everything is then connected to the wemos board, which is powered by USB cable connected to plain phone charger. Wemos board is programmed using Arduino IDE and that allowed us to connect it to our Wi-Fi home network and control the cloud using mobile-friendly web page (which again my brilliant husband made possible) and can also be controlled by our existing home automation system.
That means that it can be turned on by motion, timers or whatever we like. It has the option of changing the colors and intensity, as well as few effects like mood lights, rainbow or lightning strike (all demonstrated in the video below)
This was the interior of our cloud finished!
Next we needed to make this water bottle look more like a cloud. This is where you need to dismantle a pillow (or buy cotton stuffing separately), but I promise that the pillow is more interesting. Take your time gluing peaces of stuffing to the bottle with hot glue gun. Make it as big or small, or any shape you like, you can't really go wrong here. Just make sure to keep it looking fluffy and cover the whole bottle!
Pile up the cotton until you are satisfied with the look of your cloud and you are done! All that is left was to hang it above the crib, where we wanted it and go for a test run!
And here is a YouTube video of our cloud in it's glory :) Watch until the end to see all the possibilities!
With love,
Tamara and Janos
