Indoor or Outdoor Mood Light

You can quickly and inexpensively create mood lights for indoors or outdoors, for daytime, evening or nighttime.

Step 1: Choosing Your "lamp" Base

This is the type of water bottle that I used in this instructable but there are other brands that would work just as well. I prefer the clean lines of the cylinder shape. I prefer the plastic bottles as they allow the removal of the label quickly and cleanly.

Step 2: The Supplies Needed

Once you have your water bottle and have removed the lable, you will need to chose what to put into your "lamp". I did not have very much choice available and so chose shredded holographic film, shown above. You could use glass fragments, broken shards of a cd, or glass marbles etc. The light that goes inside can be any colour as you will see in the next step. It can be submersible or not. The brightness can also vary. The one shown here is submersible so that gave me more options. One option is to experiment with liquid of different densities such as oil and water. If that were used to fill the bottle then by agitating it, bubbles etc might form and be reflected in the light. Another possiblity is a gelatin mixture that would suspend objects at different levels in the bottle. The only restriction you have if the light is submersible is that the materials used must be translucent.

The picture shows the bottle with half a bag of the holographic film in it. By varying the amount of translucent material you can also alter the effect. You can also alter the interior of the bottle. I will add that to this instructable at a later date.

Step 3: About Lights

The first picture shows a range of lights. Some are submersible and some are not. The mood light container has a screw on lid (or base since you can turn it either way. This enables you to turn the light on or off. For the container that was used here the small round submersible and the LED lights fit best. Some of the lights can be removed from their casing and used that way. I am partial to white colour lights but they can be made to look coloured by the use of coloured transparent film. You will notice that I have only included battery powered lights for safety reasons and to allow them to be secured inside of the container. I do not recommend the use of any lights that connect to a power source other than a low powered battery.

The second picture shows some of the lights shown that are lit.

1 LED and battery: This is the simplest and gives a good range of colours. You simply put the positive leg of the LED onto the positive side of the battery and tape it there. Then place the negative leg of the LED on the negative side of the battery and tape it there. The LED will remain lit until you remove the tape. How do you know the positive leg from the negative, the longest leg is the positive. The positive side of the battery is marked with a plus sign.

2. This light is from a dollar store and is supposed to be a ring with a light but it can be inserted into a mood light container and gives a red colour. They may come in other colours, but I dont know that.

3. This light is interesting because it responds to being agitated. The colours in this case rotate through the usual range. It is useful in that you can shake the mood light container and it will illuminate but only for a certain short period of time.

4. This is a submersible light. It is turned on by rotating the dome of the light and will remain on until rotated in the opposite direction.

5. The candle light is too large for the container used here but might be adequate for a different container such as a preserving jar which can be used in place of the cylinder and makes an attractive mood light.

6 and 7. The light strings can be used. The allow the source of light to be strung out along the length of the container. One string is submersible while the other is not.

Step 4: The Different Colours That You Might Consider

Here you will see a range of colours of lights. Not all of them are submersible.

The different colours can give different effects as you can see in the garden pictures. If I had thought about it in advance I might have installed a light colour that matched the colour of the flowers nearby.

Step 5: Locating Your Mood Light

First of all, I have shown most of the picture with the silver cap at the bottom. There is no reason that it has to be at the bottom, so I have shown a picture of the same light turn upside down.

In the garden picture you can see about my comment about coordinating the colour of the lamp with the pink and violet colours surrounding the lamp.