The Popular Kitchen Lighting Trend You Can DIY With Old Coffee Cups

Just as people have tea things to accentuate the tradition and ritual of sharing a cup of tea, coffee drinkers can be counted on to accessorize their pleasures. Teacup lamps have been trendy for a few years, and now lamps made from coffee cups and mugs have begun showing up on the coffee bars of java aficionados. There are many styles of tea and coffee cup lamps with bases or shades made from ceramic cups. And while you can buy a coffee cup or teacup lamp everywhere from Etsy to Walmart, you can really personalize it with a DIY project. You can create the perfect decorative lamp from everything from glass jars to ping-pong balls. Still, nothing says "I'm serious about my coffee," like a Belgian siphon coffee maker illuminated by a lamp of your own making.

DIY lamps have long been a staple hobby among the kitschy/cutesy/crafty set. The LED era has brought with it inexpensive, smaller, more controllable lights, and with a little bit of ingenuity, you don't even need those incandescent lamp-making kits from the olden days. The design of your lamp is almost entirely up to you. LEDs are so flexible to use that you can dream up nearly any design and make it happen by gluing the right things together and drilling a few holes in the right places. This is how YouTuber @Kynosys made his three-cup ceiling light fixture, which is a good model of what goes into a DIY coffee cup lamp.

Old-school incandescent lamp kits were great, but LED light strips make brightening up your home in style a breeze. The first thing you'll want to consider is your LED setup. The LED's business end can be just about any shape and size, from tiny circuit-board-mounted lights to brighter chip-on-board (COB) LEDs to great rings of dozens of LEDs that would never fit in a teacup. Your set is likely to have a switch of some sort, perhaps a remote, and somewhere along the wire will be an LED driver. Look at everything and make sure it will fit into your design properly. From there, it's about assembling your collection to get the look you're after. Most of this is pretty standard crafting or woodworking, but note that you must have the right drill to penetrate your cups without shattering them. There are specific bits for this, but the ones we like for this purpose are actually tiny diamond-coated hole saws like you'd use to cut through kitchen tile for plumbing, only smaller ($9.99 for a set of 10 from Amazon).

How you wire the LED depends on which you have. We often prefer the strip LEDs used in this lamp with a base of stacked teacups. They're super easy to use and can be cut into segments and extended with a bit of wire to create multiple lights with one controller. You only need minor soldering skills to string these things together.

Particularly in the realm of teacup lamps, which have been around a bit longer, there is no shortage of design ideas, from the sublime to the ridiculous. How about a lighted mug on the table being "filled" by a lighted coffee pot floating above it, the two connected by a stream of what looks like coffee? We're not sure if that's ridiculous or sublime, but there are some other sure winners out there. The coffee cup pendant, stacked mug table lamp base, upside-down cup ceiling fixture, and other fairly straightforward designs are probably where your head is. But how about a cup where the lamp's head is and a saucer as the table lamp's base? If stacked is your thing, stacked coffee cup lamps are an entire genre. Mix and match cups as you see fit, as many or as few as you see fit, and even throw in something like an old percolator if you're so inclined.

If you need to illuminate an entire coffee bar, why not salvage an old fixture and make a coffee cup chandelier? Or throw a bunch of mug pendants together side-by-side for a less formal-looking bouquet of coffee LEDs. Or, for a little less light, whip up a coffee cup night light. There's an almost endless number of clever ways to repurpose old tea and coffee cups around the house, and some of the best are lighting.