The Unique DIY Lighting Feature That Will Make Your Home Feel Like The Forest Floor
If you enjoy hiking and being in nature, odds are your home is filled with plants, earthy tones, and wood elements. Nature-inspired decor is an easy way to enhance a biophilic room design. To further elevate your space, you can include lighting elements in different shapes, like the beloved mushroom lamp that looks perfect on any side table. But there's another mushroom-inspired lighting feature you can DIY for your home using LED lights and a hot glue gun. TikTok user @infinitecreativity_ made tiny, adorable mushroom lights and combined them with artificial moss to create the ultimate "forest portal mirror."
Making these mushroom lights requires parchment paper, LED lights (which you can purchase at Walmart for $6), a hot glue gun, and glue sticks, though in addition to these, the process does require time and a lot of patience. A Reddit user claimed it took them six hours to complete their mushroom lights since they included foliage and flat glass marbles for a detailed look. What's more, working with hot glue and its stringy texture can get tricky, so work slowly to prevent a mess. Before starting your DIY project, decide where you're going to put your mushroom lights. You can add them to your mirror or glue them to a faux (or natural) log to use as a coffee table centerpiece.
Creating your mushroom lights
Once you've gathered your materials, spread out your parchment paper and drop various-sized dollops of hot glue all over the surface. Let these dry completely before you remove them. In the meantime, take your fairy lights and create stems by bending the wire into straight, vertical lines with a light at each tip. Then, cover the stems in hot glue to keep them upright; a simple, thin layer will suffice. After you've bent the wire into multiple stems, remove your dollops from the parchment paper and hot glue them onto the wire stems' tips. And voilà! You have super cute mushroom lights.
You can also use materials like artificial moss from Walmart, flat glass marbles from Amazon, and wood plaque from Michaels to create a more detailed display. To replicate @infinitecreativity_'s piece, glue the artificial moss to your mirror's frame, then hot glue the mushroom stems one at a time on top of the moss. This will replicate the look of tiny mushrooms growing on your mirror. Alternatively, to create a centerpiece, take your wooden board and glue the artificial moss (or any other desired foliage) over its surface. Then, hot glue the flat marbles along the moss, followed by the fairy light mushrooms. The wire glued to the foliage will be exposed, but you can either leave it as it is or cover it with additional flat marbles.
Other ways to customize your mushroom lights
If you don't want to add hot glue to your mirror, or if you simply prefer a smaller decor piece, reuse a glass jar cap to create a miniature mushroom holder. You'll need a mason jar, artificial moss, fairy lights, and a hot glue gun with glue sticks. Remove the mason jar's cap and flip it upside down. Then, bend the wire of your fairy lights to create the mushroom stems, ensuring a light ends up at each tip. Add hot glue to the inside of the mason jar's lid and attach the stems you created. (Don't forget to space them out, as demonstrated by Instagram user @thekwendyhome.) Allow the stems to dry to the lid. While they do so, make hot glue dollops on your parchment paper and let them dry. From this point on, the steps are familiar: Add a layer of hot glue to the stems, glue the dried dollops to the stems' tips, and finally, cover the lid and wires with moss. Display your new mushroom lights on your nightstand, bookshelf, or coffee table.
There are countless ways to customize your mushroom lamps, but changing your fairy lights' color is an easy way to switch up your display. Many folks gravitate toward warm, yellow lights, but for $8.49, Amazon also sells remote-controlled fairy lights that switch from pink to blue to purple. With all this in mind, you can create the magical, whimsical mushroom lights of your dreams.