Glowing Drinks-cooler

I don’t know where you are but around here we are not allowed to have parties. So, in order to have something to look forward to, I decided to make some drinks-coolers for the mammoth party we are definitely having in the foreseeable future! Right?!

You need a large, new, white, plastic wastepaper basket and a similiarly coloured container that fits over the basket. Mine is a large, rounded salad bowl. You also need a small string of white or silver battery fairy lights, a glue gun and a clothes peg or stationery clamp or two. I found see-through ones that I thought would work particularly well because they are unobtrusive but I think white ones would also work.

I glued two pegs to the outside bottom of the salad bowl, some distance apart but more towards the centre of the bowl. This is for the fairy lights to hang from. Its better not to have the lights too close to the sides of the basket as this kind of gives away the magic a bit. I prefer the lights to be evenly distributed from the base of the basket to the base of the container but its not an exact science.

In the past I did two similiar projects using plastic toilet brush holders that had integrally-cast columns to which I could stick the lights. The one was a vase and the other a night-light. The clamps or pegs in this project serve a similiar function.

I then clamped the lights in a couple of loose loops and switched them on. You will notice that the lights are a short string with tiny bulbs. If there was a risk of the lights getting wet from condensation you could always put them in a large, clear plastic bag that you clamped.

I then put the bowl onto the wastepaper basket and filled it with ice.

Now all that's needed is a bottle of bubbly and some people...

Even the ice looks magical.