I’ve seen pictures of lampshades constructed out of the circuits out of old keyboards. While they’re ‘printed’ on thin flexible plastic, they’re mostly clear, so I assume they used a small wattage bulb.
I kind of needed a new lampshade, so I decided to give it a try. I first glued a layer of plastic film that I got out of old flat screen monitors to diffuse the light. I was using a 100 watt equivalent. Then I glued in the circuits vertically. To finish, I used a flat power cord to line the top and bottom.
Since I had two lamps, I eventually did the other one. Since the old shade frame was at too much of an angle, I bought some lampshade rings. As an experiment, I used a roll of plastic shelving covering from the hardware store for my diffusing layer.
One thing I never got around to – I saved the purple PS/2 connector off of the keyboards and I was going to connect them as ‘tassles’ or ‘fringe’ along the bottom. I’ve got them in a box somewhere.