This lamp was completed in January of 2019, but as it so often does, Life got in the way of documenting it on the blog until now. As mentioned in my Lamp Lust post, I’ve been a little obsessed with Ettore Sottsass’ work since I learned about the Memphis Milano design movement around 2014. The lamp I mentioned in that post is his “Asteroid Lamp” designed in 1968 (learn more about this lamp on the MoMA website):

I got the idea for this “knockoff Asteroid Lamp” DIY when I visited Canal Plastics in lower Manhattan on a weekend walk, where I found a (straight) clear acrylic tube and acrylic sheet for the base along with the appropriate glue, and I was able to purchase a pink LED strip just down the street. I then bought a heat gun at my local hardware store, after which this project came together within maybe an hour or two? I usually tend to plan projects forever and sometimes never get around to them, but this one went from “spark” to completion in a weekend.

It really is quite a rudimentary lamp, it’s not a perfect horseshoe as I would have liked, there’s no on/off switch on the lamp itself (would be nice to have it on the base or cord), and the LED strip is longer than the acrylic tube, so it comes out and extends on one end. Nonetheless it was fun to experiment with the heat gun and acrylic tube - to bend the tube you have to heat it up with the heat gun and then carefully bend it into shape bit by bit to get a nice wide horse shoe shape - and now I have a fun object reminiscent of the Asteroid Lamp!

One of the only process picture - this was during the gluing stage. Before this I used the heat gun to carefully bend the acrylic tube, fed the LED strip through, and cut out a piece at one end of the tube (on the right side of the photo) to allow the LED strip to exit the tube and bend. I think I used an box cutter for this, combined with the heat gun to soften the acrylic - probably not the cleanest way to do it, but those were the tools I had! The horse shoe is not perfectly symmetrical, one side is slightly shorter, which was not my intention, but luckily this worked out perfectly and allowed extra space for the LED strip.

I then decided the placement of the horse shoe, marked the position where the longer end of the horse shoe meets the acrylic base with painters tape, and glued the tube down. To help it hold its position as the glue dried, I taped the LED strip coming out the other side to the acrylic base as well.

After the glue was dry I removed the tape, and that’s it! Not the most sophisticated DIY, but it does the trick! It’s definitely more of a “mood setting” lamp than a functional one, and I like that the arch is wide enough to place something beneath it - like a plant or a small statue!

To summarize, these are the materials and tools I used:

• acrylic tube (wide enough to fit the LED strip)
• color LED strip (mine was pink and 1 yard long, this was the shortest length I could get, as I understand they can only be cut at 1 yrd increments)
• small piece sheet acrylic (for the base)
• acrylic glue
• painters tape
• heat gun

I have since moved this lamp from the living room to the dresser in the bedroom, where it unfortunately doesn’t get much use, as I just tend to forget about it! I think one big improvement would be an on/off switch, which I’m sure could be easily done if I knew more about cables…

Hope this was informative and inspiring!