My group got rejected from our first preference, the asian restaurant/bar in Melbourne Central, so we went around the city for a while, looking for other suitable places. We didn't find much, but Jiyoon knew a Korean restaurant on Latrobe street. So we went there, it looked pretty good, it had a ledge at the front, just behind a long window with all the menus on it. The ledge would fit our lanterns comfortably.
There were a few hiccups in the development of my lantern, we first decided on an asian theme to suit the first restaurant, but after we were rejected, we re-thought our strategy. Our next idea was geometric shapes, this worked fairly well.
My original idea was inspired by the art of origami. here a some pics of what i created after hours of playing with paper:
After i made this initial shape, i created 5 more of the same and joined them with glue, in the shape of a flower.
This flower shape looked good so i made many more and thought about ways of connecting them together. first i thought of sticking them to a square lantern box, but this idea didn't really put the shape to its full use. So, using wire, i connected the paper flowers together, this created a sort of 'net' of flowers, which i could bend into any shape, i wanted to make a complete sphere initially, but i realised that would take a lot more paper so i bent it into something like an elongated dome.
the lantern wasn't complete at this point because it didn't really have a basic covering of rice paper, i decided this could wait so i moved onto electronics.
We went to Jaycar electronics and after talking to a sales assistant for a while we realised the best way to illuminate the lanterns would be to buy a ready made strip of LEDs and extend the wire to suit our needs. so we bought a pack of 10 strips with 3 LEDs in each strip all connected to each other in a parallel circuit. i took some of my dads wire and extended the strip. so the final strip of LEDs was 3 (strips with 3 LEDs in each strip) - 2 - 3 - 2.
we figured as a group that mine and fiona's lanterns would need 3 strips of LEDs in each.
so this was the final circuit:
and here are the individual strips with my connections:
I finally realised that i still hadnt solved the problem of my unfinised lantern, the lights would look too exposed sitting inside it as it was. so i looked back at the earlier origami we did and found origami paper balls, this was perfect, i could put a strip of LEDs in each ball and put them inside my lantern.
After a while we agreed that the Korean restaurant was our best option, so we went in and showed a couple of unfinished lanterns to the General Manager and he said it would be fine.
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