Project 15 Week 19 – Recycled Plastic Bag Pendant Light

I couldn’t be more excited about this week’s project, a beautiful pendant light made from recycled plastic bags, and the fact that it marks the halfway point in my 30x30x3 journey.

For those of you new this week, here’s a reminder of my lofty goal.  I plan on completing 30 projects over the course of 30 weeks based on the 3 R’s that my blog is named for: Reduce, Reuse, Redecorate!  (As you can see, I’m not exactly maintaining a one project a week schedule, but I will get there by my deadline I promise!)

My light this week is based on the same technique as my Drinking Straw Pendant Lamp from Project 10, which in turn was based on a tutorial by Mark Montano.  I started with the same metal baskets, but instead of folding straws to poke through the holes, I cut up some plastic bags from the grocery store into strips approximately 1 inch wide and 3 inches long, and threaded those through the holes instead of the straws.  Then I made two sconces, wired them together and had one full sphere pendant!

The bags I chose to use were white with some black printing, and they were a heavier and higher quality of plastic than the normal drug store plastic bag.  Personally I liked the heavier feel of the plastic, and I thought the black pieces gave it some real interest.  But, you can use any type of plastic bag you have lying around your house, and you can either choose to show colors or keep it purely white, its all up to your own personal preference.

You can also stop halfway through the project and leave it as a wall sconce, which I think is pretty awesome too.  I made sure to photograph mine as a sconce before attaching the two halves together, here’s an image of the sconce version.  It looks pretty similar to the pendant light, but with a bit of light reflected back on the wall.

I hope you like this week’s project as much as I do, its a great way to reuse some of those extra plastic bags we all have lying around.  And if this seems like too big a project for you to do on your own (and trust me, it was a bit time consuming) then check out my new Lighting store on Etsy, Zipper8Lighting which is an offshoot of my original housewares store Zipper8Design.

Ciao for now, Allison