Lighting experiments

Clipped to the AVL loom in our garage is a ancient, super-dented utility light with an old 60w incandescent light bulb in it.  It's been attached to the loom, first the Cranbrook and now the AVL, since I bought it at Cliff's Hardware in the Castro in 2001.  I've dropped it a million times, but the bulb is the same one I've had in it since I bought it, and so far it has not burned out yet.  I love the flood of golden light it casts on the fell of the cloth as I weave. 

But...electric bills are becoming scarier than they used to be.  Most of our lighting upstairs has been converted either to those annoyingly charm-free twisty fluorescent bulbs (great for electric bills, lousy for ambience) or to LED lights.  Some halogens too, though I think that those might use a lot of juice.   Carlos recently bought a tiny LED spotlight torchere lamp for our living room, and it's wonderful...pleasant light that focuses in a nice pool just wide enough to light up a reading area for one person. 

Last weekend, we were out at Home Depot.   Ahhhh...how I love a good hardware store.  While we were there, I decided to purchase a 12" LED light strip, as Tien did for her loom, for the AVL.  Tien mounted hers on the underside of the front piece of the castle of her loom, so I've decided I might do that.  There is a small loop hook for the fly shuttle that is already there in the center of the underside of my castle, which if I want to mount the LED strip in the center of the castle will have to be removed.  Perhaps I'll buy another of the LED strips since if there were two, they could be mounted on either side of the little hook for the fly shuttle without it needing to be removed.

Of course the electrical cord that came with the LED light strip is about two inches long, so Carlos bought me a long extension cord yesterday. 

I held the lit LED strip up to where it would be on the loom, and it worked, but it was somehow odd - a brighter, whiter light than the incandescent I've been using for years, but somehow...it did not seem to look bright enough to see the details of things.  Maybe it'll be different when I'm sitting on the bench weaving.  And it would be nice to do anything to keep those electric bills down...