It took over 1,000 gummy bears to cover this lampshade

Props

Oct 6

Oh, my favorite reoccurring segment: Free Samples. I love this segment because I’m usually tasked with making something incredibly random and cool. The premise of this “deal” is to present the trader with a miscellaneous prop filled with a large mystery quantity of something. The trader then has a choice between $5 per item on the prop or a mystery prize behind the curtain. I’ve made a paperclip necklace, a glow stick helmet, a lego tissue box, and more.

In this episode, our prop was a gummy bear lamp with a mystery number of gummy bears! This assignment reminded me of an episode of iCarly I watched as a kid and I had a lot of ideas to create my own!

This project wasn’t difficult by any means, it just took a long time. Even after recruiting multiple coworkers for assistance, this project took about 5 working days to complete and most of the time was spent sorting and gluing.

I started by organizing my gummy bears into separate bowls by color. Once I had a good amount to start with, I began gluing the gummies vertically in a repeating pattern around the lamp shade.

Selecting the right glue for a project is a pretty important decision, and sometimes requires some trial and error. By the end of my testing, I found the DAP Rapid Fuse (Amazon) worked the best, followed by Gorilla Glue GEL (Amazon).

After completing each vertical row, I had a small gap at the bottom of the shade. I chose to create some hanging elements to fill this gap and elevate the look. To do this, I used a regular sewing needle and white thread and strung three gummies onto the thread, with space between each gummy. Since the gummy bears were so sticky, they stayed in place on the string without any knots. This took awhile because my needles were getting sticky and bent so I had to periodically replace them.

As we completed the lamp shade, I got to work on the base. My boss ordered a giant gummy bear that we wanted to sit as the base of the lamp. This gummy was much harder to work with because of its weight and how sticky it was to the touch. I ended up creating a hollow slot vertically down the back of the gummy bear, just wide enough to fit around the base of the lamp. We then inserted 2 wooden skewers to help the gummy bear hold up his own weight. I sat the gummy bear on the base of the lamp and glued a small piece of Sintra on the back to hold it together.

I knew this prop was only going to play for about 2 minutes, so I didn’t bother purchasing or making resin gummy bears for it. At the end of the season, the lamp was still standing and hadn’t attracted any bugs, so I coated it in a clear mod podge spray and took it home! It’s been living in my apartment for over a year now.