by Baron Jonathan Blackbow

So Tournaments Illuminated had a request for articles about alternative sources of light that would
blend in with the feel of an event. Eerily enough, I just finished such a thing this past December.
Millstone 4-H Camp is located in Ellerbe, NC, and over the past couple of years I’ve gotten to be
reasonably decent friends with the staff. While we were tooling around the site one day I noticed that
their fireplace wasn’t being used and asked about it. The response was fairly predictable: “the fireplace
is damaged and we don’t have the $13,000 it would take to repair it.”

I started thinking. A friend of mine, Mistress Alianor atte Red Swanne, received her Laurel for working in
stained glass. One “eureka” later, the idea was broached… and promptly shot down for the rather steep
costs involved, both monetarily and time-wise.

So, back to the drawing board. Well, I’d seen stuff on Youtube about faux stained glass. It’s easy. All
you do is get plexiglass, and paint pens. Now, I’m not going to lie and say that making actually “stained
glass” looking glass is easy, because I didn’t have time to recreate transparent stained glass as opposed
to what paint pens can manage, which is basically translucent stained glass, but still, it was worth
pursuing.

The single biggest cost, of course, was the plexiglass. But it was available at Home Depot for not an
unreasonable amount of money. After that it was paint pens, and finding a pattern on the internet for
flames, and printing it large enough. Then I just put the paper behind the plexiglass and started tracing
the flame outlines in black. After that it was “look at this flame, determine how hot it would be
depending on its distance from the center of the fire” (again, there are youtube videos for this), and try
to stay inside the lines.

I had already decided before I ever started painting that the paint on plexiglass wasn’t going to be
enough. Fortunately, technology reared its head, in the form of LED flame bulbs. They just got cheap
about a year ago. Off to my local Habitat for Humanity where I bought a bathroom vanity mirror light
strip for $10 that had six bulb sockets. Buy the flame bulbs on Amazon, finish painting the fireplace,
light it up in my basement… it looked terrific. I didn’t want to take it to Millstone.
But I did anyway. They love it.

LED flame bulbs are a relatively cheap, effective way to simulate flames anywhere you want them. You
can buy a “wall sconce”, wire it, and put one in there. You can buy a wire basket, put some firewood in
it, and put one of these in the middle of the firewood. You could put one in the middle of those water
filled glass globe sculpture things. You could put one in the nostrils of a dragon. On and on and on.

I’m told that they make 12v versions of this since the wattage requirements of an LED bulb are so low.
Have fun playing with fire.

Regards
Baron Jonathan Blackbow