Tudor / Medieval wall light tutorial

I've been longing to try to make a light fixture for ages, and today I just knuckled down and did it!  It's a little crude, and I know I can make it better, but I thought it might help someone else attempt something if I wrote down the steps and showed the results :)

Here's what I used:  a ready-made 1:12 scale eaves bracket (but you could use any piece of wood or a decorative corbel or something similar), a bead cap and a screw-in candle bulb complete with wire.  I stained the bracket walnut.

I drilled a hole through the bracket.  Well, in the case of this bracket, because it has a hole in the middle of it, I drilled two holes -- one at an angle from the top of the bracket into the hole and another straight in from the back into the hole.  This actually was quite convenient because it meant I could use a rather short drill bit :)  If I had a solid piece of wood, I would have used a longer drill bit and just drilled diagonally from the top of the bracket and out the back.

I painted the bead cap black and glued it on the top of the bracket, over the hole.

I was a little bit nervous about how fiddly this next step would be, but it went swimmingly enough.  I removed the plug from the light bulb assembly, cut the ends of the wire off cleanly, straightened the wire and pushed it through the hole from the top.  When the wire got into the centre cut-out, I used a thin knitting needle to make it turn the corner and kept pushing.  Voilà!  The wire obligingly exited the bracket at the back :)  I'm sure that the next one I make, it will be possible to hear me swearing all the way from Canada!

And here's the socket in place -- a bit gloopy from the glue, but just as planned.  You can see a bit of white wire coming through  the centre hole of the bracket, but that's easily fixed.

You can hardly see the wire now, because I've pushed a little glue up to the top of the cut out hole, glued the wire in place and painted it black!

Now to make the light socket look more like a candle. I would have used a bit of drinking straw, if I had had any around.  Instead, I rolled a piece of light card tightly around a thin paintbrush, tested it for fit, and then glued it together to form a tube.  When dried, I slipped the tube over the socket.  I may add some decorative white glue blobs to represent candle wax (considering I leave white glue blobs whereever I go, it would be nice to have some that were MEANT to be there :))

And here's the fixture stuck to the wall with Museum Putty!  Of course I need to decide where it's going to live, drill a hole, glue the fixture to the wall, refit the plug, etc., but I'm pretty pleased that I've finally actually made my own light fixture, blobby though it may be!

Now I need to learn to solder!