Let There Be Light!

When searching for lights for my new Village Shop series, I ran across a shop on Etsy selling tiny battery operated LED lights and thought they would be perfect for these buildings.  Sure enough, they are perfect!

You can purchase a light set, with everything you need in a package, which is what I did for only $5.50, additional lights only for $2.50 and a battery, battery holder with switch only for $3.00.  At these prices, for a two room building or smaller, your lighting is super affordable and far easier to work with than round or tape wiring!!

UPDATE !!!! – I’ve since started ordering ALL lighting materials from a shop called Model Train Software.  Please visit their website for lighting products. Great customer service! They are more than happy to answer any questions and help you with ordering the correct materials.

First things first . . .

• Here’s a link to the shop where I bought the lights:  true2scale
• And here’s a link to the shops easy peasy Tutorial for the lights.
• And here’s a link where you can purchase additional lights only!

Here’s a look at what comes in the “set” package and how it comes to you.  Now don’t panic!!!  (grin).  This is so super easy even I couldn’t mess it up and I’ve been terrified of lighting!

Basically you have two wires connected to the led light and two wires coming off the switch/battery unit.  Place the battery into the battery holder, plus side to plus side (marked on both the battery and the holder).  Now, see the little black tubes?  Slip one tube on each of the wires coming off the switch/battery unit then twist the light wires to the switch/battery unit wires . . . red to red and then the other two wires to each other.  And when done, this is what you have . . .

Make sure that the little black tubes are covering all exposed wires and then use a hair dryer to heat up the black tubes so they shrink tightly around the wires where you twisted them together.

NOTE: The only issue I had was that my blow dryer wouldn’t get hot enough to shrink up the black tubes.  I had to get my craft heat gun out and use it.  With the heat gun, the tubes shrunk up in seconds

Now here’s the light, lit-up

And here it is inside my house with the battery and extra wire up on the shelf in the shop ceiling.

And in a dark room so you can see how much light it gives off.  Pretty good huh!  Bright enough that you can see what’s inside the house, looking through the windows.

As to the use in the village shop, you might want to make the ledge bottom wider as the battery holder is almost an inch in diameter.

A few notes and ideas for you shop . . .

The wire on these lights is very tiny and could easily be hidden behind any of the trim.  You could then simply place the battery on the floor with a cupboard or other furniture over or in front of it.  This is fine if you want to leave the lights on all the time so that you would only need to move the battery holder when you change the battery.

To use the shelf to hold the light, as a ceiling light, you can use a small piece of score tape to tape the wire down so that the light rests on the bottom of the ledge, in the center.  At that point you could create a fixture to cover the led light from paper, a small plastic tube, even a heavy paper straw painted would work.  Just keep in mind that the narrower or smaller the diameter of the shade, the more it will direct the light downward instead of all around the room.

For me . . . I want to leave the lights on most all times and therefore don’t want to be opening the building up when I change the battery.  So what I’m going to do is drill a very tiny hole in the building and run the light end through to the inside.  I did have thoughts of making wall sconces with these type of lights once I decided to add my light in this way.  I can see how this would be so very easy to do as all you would need to do is to find some plastic piece to use as a globe and a small washer as the base!  In fact, I just might work on that tonight so be sure to check back in a day or two on this post to see what I’ve done!

That all said, there is one more thing I want to mention, and another good reason to maybe run the light wire from the back of the building, through the wall to the inside.  According to the tutorial from the shop where I purchased the lights, you can actually connect several lights to one battery holder!!!  This means you could, for the shop, attach two or more lights to one battery holder and then run them into the shop for each floor. From the switch to the end of the wire where the light is, you have about 9″ to play with and that will go pretty far in these shops.  If I thought a bit more, I probably would have done this for my Tea Shop!

Lastly, these lights would be great for lighting the inside of a cabinet or an under counter light for a shop display counter.  I’m sure too that you could find a way to use these on the outside of a shop!  Or . . . get an inexpensive street lamp and add one of these lights to it!

So that’s it for now but I’ll come back and update once I have my lights in place!

Update – 01

I used a small flat clear button, glued to a larger curved flower button for the shade.  The LED light is run through the button hole and back towards the trim where it’s tucked into the trim.  Any remaining wire will be painted white to hide it.

Update – 02

So after the above was said and done I ran across another site for LED lights and received them today.  As before, the same way to build the light was used but these actually have two lights per set/battery and they are larger and brighter than the ones above.  Here’s a look at the pkg and the light, parts and finished.

Here’s a link to where I purchased these lights.  The item I purchased was the “Miniaturists Lighting Package $6.80 usd” with . . .

• coin cell holder : 4 inch wires
• LED wire Length : 8 inch wires
• coin cell battery : 1 battery
• Color : Warm White
• 1.8mm LEDs : 2 light packet

As you can see below, they are brighter than the other lights mentioned in the original post.

So this “package deal” will give you two lights to use in a single shop while having only one battery to conceal.  You can also change the package deal up adding as many as 6 lights and longer wires if needed.

Pretty inexpensive for lighting huh!

Toodles . . .

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