Craft Night

A new tradition is brewing in the Banbury home. I've always liked to do little projects when time allowed, and since there has been zero snow for some time now we've decided to try out a Craft Night with Hilary and Dennen Frazier. A couple times a month we will be attempting to build/create/destroy something. For the maiden voyage we decided to make concrete light bulb wall hooks.

First we started with a simple incandescent light bulb. Brand does not matter, we prefer cheap.

Next we removed all innards of the light bulb and used a tooth brush to clean out the inner white powder coating.

Dennen and I are mixing the mortar to proper specification. We used mortar because its main component is sand. Concrete uses gravel and there is no way we are going to fit rocks into a bulb. Besides, a 10 lb bag of mortar mix was 2 dolla.

Hilary is filling her bulb with the mortar mix taking special care to shake the bulb allowing for max compaction. When the bulb is almost full we put 3.5 inch long 5/16 lag screws in the bulb and packed mortar around them.

We put the filled bulbs in cups to dry for at leat 72 hours.

After 72 hours we took a handle of a cresent wrench and broke the bulb cast to reveal a pocketed and shiny surfaced mortar bulb.

Isn't she beautiful? Just predrill a hole in a wall and screw it in there. It gives a cool, industrial feel to your home. We are going to get a long piece of wood, paint it black, and screw about four bulbs into it for coat/hat/whatever hooks.

All in all it was a little time consuming with the first 4 bulbs. I decided to modify the method by removing the conical shaped terminus of the light bulb which made a wider hole to work with. The next 4 bulbs should take half the time. It was way fun though, good times with good people. The Fraziers decided to cook dinner as well, which was pretty rychus of them. They made baked, marinated salmon with wild rice and veggies. It was soooo good. Michelle and I were pumped to try something new because neither of us have had salmon since we were kids. The next project is going to be a homemade pneumatic net gun...Zombies beware.