Handmade Birthday: Toy Lamp

I found this project at Turning Stones and I knew I had to make it for someone. Since my nephew turned 9 just after Christmas, and since he's such a fan of toy figurines and handmade crafts, I thought that he'd appreciate this. Turning Stones has a pretty good tutorial on how to make this, and I followed her advice very closely.

First, I found a bunch of random toys at Goodwill, along with a tabletop lamp base. I also pulled out a few toys from my toy box stash to supplement.

I decided that the two largest pieces, the gorilla and the dragon, were going to be my feature pieces so I determined their placement first. From there I started gluing on the smaller pieces around them, and crafted a storyline for the piece as I went along (of course, the storyline is not necessary, but it did make it more interesting for me, and helped me determine placement for the many pieces). It took about four hours to glue everything on, but the time passed fairly quickly. I used the Loctite quick-drying gel superglue recommended on Turning Stones. At first I purchased the wrong Loctite glue, and after holding the piece on the lamp for five minutes with nothing happening, I quickly realized my mistake and purchased new glue (I went through 3 bottles of glue for this project).

I had to do a little cutting and carving to get all the pieces to fit, particulary to make it look like the gorilla is hanging onto the lamp. For that I cut off his right arm, then glued it back on raised up.
After all the pieces were glued on, it was time for a coat of plastic primer spray paint, and then...

... multiple coats of turquoise spray paint!

Dragon and Gorilla are fighting for dominance over the city (Dragon's weapon of choice? A lobster, of course).

The citizens are irate, traffic has come to a standstill, sewer monsters are escaping, and bad guys are taking advantage of the mayhem.

The citizens are arming themselves and taking to the streets. It's a fight of good against evil!

* UPDATE * If you have moveable parts on the toys, be sure to glue them down. We noticed that some of the paint will chip if the parts move. Also, if you have softer rubber toys, like the sewer monster above, I wouldn't suggest using them. The paint will also chip off these. It's a shame too, because the rubbery toys are so poseable!