Seeing my lamp actually take the shape of my initial design was such a satisfying feeling, considering that many friends told me I was trying to bite off more than I can chew with the design complexity. I had to learn a lot about the use of CAD to make it possible, and a lot of preparation was needed before I could even make a line or a curve on it. There were no dramas with the lasercutting except for the fact that I accidentally had 3 of one panel size and 1 of another size, so I needed one re-cut.
My friend and I did the electrical wiring, originally it was to consist of a series of LEDs on varying lengths of wire and that would be sufficient to light it, however, when we started doing this, we found that even our bright LEDs were not bright enough to be useful. We then experimented with different bulbs available to us, and we found that small halogen bulbs were most useful. We headed off to Bunnings to pick up some bulbs of varying wattage and a transformer. We had no problems wiring it up, and it was appropriately bright.
I took it all home to work on backing the panels with the rice paper, which went very smoothly, the spray adhesive worked particularly well, and I simply cut around the edges with a scalpel. Assembly was effortless and I was so pleased that it looked better than I'd imagined it. Fortunately there wasn't a whole lot of difference between the effect of the 20W and the 50W bulbs as the 50W bulb had a tendency to heat the lamp a fair amount, though definitely not dangerously so.
Now that this lamp is complete I plan to attempt to create its negative as originally planned...
