Hi all Steemians,
I want to share with you a cool Bamboo Lamp , which I designed. As I have been living in China for a long time I always try to use that experience and integrate it in my design.
The importance of Bamboo in the Chinese culture cannot be understated and it's being used in so many areas: furniture, cutlery (chopsticks),textile, home floor, scaffolding to name a few! Also you can eat it and it is really delicious ! It grows very fast so it's a very environmental friendly material. Actually bamboo is not a type of wood, it belongs to the grass family poaceae. Some species of bamboo can actually grow up to one meter in 24 hours, so you could literally watch it grow, that is if you are patient enough :)
I am sorry for ranting about this material, but it's so cool! Bamboo not only have had a lot of physical use in China, but it has also had a lot of spiritual value! It has played such a huge role in Chinese culture that it has even been regarded as a behavior model for men , as bamboo has features such as physical strength, elegance, and uprightness!
So anyways, back to the design! What I do love about bamboo is that it is hollow, so I knew I wanted to use this feature! Further more Bamboo is very flexible. I often like to feel the material before I use it so I can understand it and familiarize myself with the different possibilities of the material. I bought one thick stem of the bamboo as I knew it would be my base , and then I bought a lot of bamboo sticks( very thin). I started twisting and bending it, using hot water with soap to bend the wood and shape it. Eventually I came up with the shape below , It is a very simple shape actually, but by using it repeatedly I knew I could create something very interesting!
So I played around with the placement on the stem piece and made 4 holes in a line . As you can see in the close up the row of holes are placed on different levels so to allow the bamboo sticks to overlap naturally.
Further more I used different length for each stick that I bent into a petal, so that the top petal would be the smallest and then increase in size from hole 1 to 4, this created a more dynamic shape I think.
The holes of the base stem I intentionally made a bit bigger so that the light could penetrate through it and light up the stick petals.
I hope you like the design and that it can give someone inspiration and please upvote if you do :)
