Outside View

Outside View
The Exterior View of New Orleans Townhouse

Saturday, July 4, 2020

Part 1:DIY Dollhouse Light with LED Chips

These are the parts I purchased
I am making lights for the Sunflower Farmhouse, I wanted the look of oil lamps and just a more custom look in general. I wanted to try a LED lighting system but I really don't know much about it other than it it seems less expensive and it appears to give you more options. I've seen it being used mostly in trains and models but I have seen it in a few dollhouses. I thought I would give it a try to make my own and see if I could light the whole house with LED lights. So this post is for people like me. If you have tips please share.

I ordered my LED lights from Evan Designs, I ordered the wire stripper they sell too. My regular wire stripper is too large for these tiny wires. I watched Evans Designs YouTube videos and I called them to ask for more information before I placed my order. The person I spoke to was very helpful. 

This bag contains the mega chip lights, which is the largest chip not bulb light they sell. I chose warm color instead of the white.
 This is what one mega chip light looks like, its very small and flat, despite it's name
To test its brightness, I twisted the wires from the light to the ones from the battery adaptor together. Make sure you order or have a separate single battery or adaptor to test your lights. This was not permanent otherwise I would have used shrink tube to cover the exposed wires. Match the exposed part of the wires color to same color (red to red, etc). And make sure you twist them in a spiraling motion stretching out down the length of the exposed wire, one wire over the other underneath without the plastic coating. My light didn't work at first because the exposed wire of red color touched and made contact onto its self along with the opposite black color wire.

I bought the battery adaptor with an on/off switch 
Here is a picture of it on

I played around with the lights and the jewelry to get an idea of the possibilities. Hobby Lobby had a jewelry 50% off sale and these are some of the glasswork I bought for the lights. You can use almost any kind of glue right on top of the LEDs, you can use hot glue on the larger lights. I would not use supper glue on glass because it might fog it up.
The top served off by unscrewing it
I put the megs chip inside through the opening  
I wanted to see if the light would shine through these
This is how bright they looked with the craft room light on, the magnifying effect seemed to make it bigger and brighter
This set of bottles was a good value because it came with chains, which you can use in your lights.
These reminded me of the flame shape bulbs used in a Chandelier
I would use this in a modern house or a larger room because of the bottle.
 The openings were too small on the bottles below for the mega chip. So I ordered the smaller nano and pico chips to fit the bottles with the smaller openings. I also order the dollhouse/miniature light kits them offer.
The business card is great, you can use the size chart to find the the light size or shape, that will fit in the opening of your project. 

4 comments:

  1. This is what I want to do. I am going to have to relook and go step by step to try this.

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  2. Hi I used a string of small Christmas lights and made wall hangings out of jewelry and bead findings placed through holes drilled into the back walls of my dollshouse built into an antique bookcase.

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  3. This is an awesome post. Do you know if you can wire more than I light to the battery?

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  4. I just use this as a tester but you can and more than one light by twisting together and matching the red to red and black to black wires

    ReplyDelete