DIY Unicorn Lamp

Turn a regular pony to a magical unicorn with this DIY Unicorn Lamp tutorial!

Growing up my grandfather carved wooden horses. And I don’t mean small wooden toy horses that you hold in your hand. I have a wooden rocking horse that he made. And at my grandparents house there were full sized horses in their hallway that he made. At least one was a carousel style with a metal pole in the center. I always loved those horses. Mostly we looked at them but I did get to sit on one sometimes, especially as a child.

My grandmother gave me a charm bracelet when I was about 12 and one of the first charms that she gave me was a carousel horse.

You could say that unicorns are having a bit of a moment in the spotlight right now. Not that they were ever unpopular of course. Staring at the plastic toy horses at the store one day I thought about how easy it would be to transform that toy horse into a unicorn. And that could be the base for a fantastic new DIY Unicorn Lamp.

I started by drilling a hole through the center of my horse the same size as the rod on my lamp.

Originally I hoped to be able to disassemble my lamp and push the lamp rod through the unicorn horse, but the way my lamp was made it didn’t quite work out. My solution was to make a cut on one side of the horse. Then I could wrap the horse around the rod. And I could patch that seam up afterwards. 

Once my horse was drilled and cut I used gold metallizer to give my horse a unicorn gold finish.

I painted the horses mane and tail with some acrylic teal paint.

Finally, my unicorn needed a horn. I used hot pink sculpting clay that had a metallic finish to it. I molded the horn and then baked it according to the directions on the package. When the horn was finished I used super glue to attach it to my horse.

With that my unicorn transformation was complete! I just needed to add my unicorn to my lamp.

I bent the horse to get it around the lamp rod. Then I used some air dry clay to patch up the seam. Once that air dry clay was dry I used the same gold metallizer to cover up the seam and finish up my unicorn lamp.

The last step was putting on the lamp shade. I picked a neutral shade with gold accents to match my unicorn. I’m toying with the idea of adding some teal and pink spots to the lamp shade to really tie the colors in.

Regular pony to a magical unicorn! This DIY Lamp Unicorn was such a fun project to make. And you can watch me make it LIVE on Facebook here.