Flower De Lis

My wife Lisa and I decided to make gifts for each other for Valentine's Day. Being that I worked at a steel fab shop and really love steel as my medium, I at least knew what my gift would be made of. That's all I knew.

Inspiration
CAD program. I use Autocad.
1 - 4x8x11ga sheet of steel
Plasma table
Steel steel roller
Mig Welder - any welder will do
Undercabinet light string

I had made trivet and coaster sets before and thought they would be easy. I contemplated this for a while but wanted to do something more personal. What does she like? Candles, she loves candles. We've had some nice table top candle holders and started drafting up some designs. I liked the paisley pattern and knew right away that's what I wanted to use. I played around with 4" high holders, but thought, no, let's go bigger. I worked on some 12" high designs. They were nice but I still felt I wanted something more unique. After another week or so of kicking around ideas, I decided to go really big. My goal was to use a whole sheet of steel. Now that I know its going to be pretty large, I start working on the pattern. I quickly realize that drawing 48 Sq ft of pattern is going to take a really long time. Since 2 Sq ft of pattern is much easier to do I go to work on that. It took quite a while for the O.C. side of me to come up with a repeatable pattern.

Now that I have the pattern figured out, it's time to get up from my desk and get to work. During design I realized that an 8 ft lamp was too much. I decided 6' would be perfect. Jump drive in hand I head out to the plasma table. After about 30 minutes of table time, I'm super happy with the pattern. Since our shop didn't have a large enough roller, I head over to the shop of a friend who who does industrial HVAC sheetmetal to roll it into a barrel. Now comes the welding. I weld the barrel closed, add the top, bottom and feet. It looks great and I'm super happy with the outcome. For lighting, I installed a ceramic fixture with a traditional incandescent light bulb. Project complete just in time for the holiday.

I finished the lamp just in time to present my gift to my wife. She loves it. It is a great addition to our home.

After a few weeks, we realize that the incandescent bulbs aren't working. Not sure why but the bulb burns out every week or so. It's not overheating so I'm not sure what the issue is. I look for other light options and decide on a 5 light string of LED under counter lights. These work so much better and are adjustable.

We've enjoyed the lamp now for a few years and haven't had any more burn outs. We have had it on continously the entire time. It has a nice subtle glow and makes cool patterns on the walls and ceiling. We love it.