Ingenuity

My parents have this table in their living room that they use for a computer desk. It's kind of funky looking with metal bars in an "X" shape for legs, and a glass top. It's an absolute perfect table when you need to trace something though. I had lamp with a clip that I'd attach to one of the metal bars and aim up at the glass and trace away. It was much easier to use than a little light table that my mom also has--a lot more surface space. I used it for quite a few wedding crafts.

Unfortunately, when I got married and moved to be with my husband, I also moved away from the glass top table. I've tried improvising a few ways. Our living room has two big sliding glass windows and I can successfully trace things by pressing the pages against the window, that is if I don't mind the backache that comes from drawing at an odd angle. I thought I'd found a better solution today when I took the glass out of a picture frame and kind of propped it up in my lap so that I could use the natural light in the room to light the back of my  paper. This worked fine until I pulled my stuff out after dinner when it started getting dark.

Enter my husband. He saw me struggling to sit backwards in the chair by the window to get light behind my glass and said, "I've got a better idea." He's big into fish tanks and had a spare light that he set upside down on the table for me. He grabbed two stacks of DVDs and put one on either side of the light and balanced my picture frame glass across it to make a table. Then he was worried that since the light is long and I'd only be using one end of it that the unused end would shine too brightly in my eyes, so he covered it with a magazine.

And voila! A light table was born.

 Then he played photographer while I was hard at work.

Behold--finished art and no backache!

I knew I married him for a reason. ;)

(Even if I do have to realphabetize my movies when I'm done)