Get out your glue gun and get ready to make something magical.
These adorable handmade mushroom lights will turn any room into a fairy forest realm, with lights that animate, change colors, and respond to sounds or music. They're made from "fairy light"-style NeoPixel LED lights, with stiff coated wires that bend easily into whatever shape you want. Coat the lights in hot glue and you get amazing light diffusion throughout the whole mushroom.
This guide will show you tips and tricks for making adorable mushroom shapes -- though you could easily use the same technique to make any number of glowing organic shapes, or even use a casting mold to make almost any shape you can imagine. The lights are connected to an Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion board with WLED installed: a free, open-source LED programming interface that allows you or your young helpers to create endless animations and color combinations with just a few clicks -- no coding required.
These LEDs are made from fairly stiff wire that will hold its shape when you bend and twist it. The wires are coated in durable resin, so even though they appear to be bare wire, the wires won't short against each other.
These lights are not as good for wearables or applications where they'll get flexed again and again, but they hold up very well to being twisted into shape once and secured.
They come in a strand of 100, and they are not cuttable -- or rather, you can cut the strand but can't use the cut-off part for another project.
The Mini Sparkle Motion board is an ESP32 controller designed to work with WLED. It's small and compact and will drive hundreds of lights, powered through its onboard USB-C port.
For a no-soldering version of this project, use this board with a pre-soldered terminal block.
Or, if you're comfortable with a soldering iron, this board comes in a slightly smaller, low profile version with solderable GPIO pins.
Sculpting with hot glue can be a bit messy. This silicone mat is the perfect surface to protect your table. The hot glue will stick to it just enough to hold your mushrooms in place, but then peels off clean and easy when it's set up.
You'll also need a USB-C type cable for loading the WLED software and powering the finished project and a JST connector (optional but helpful) to connect to the light strand.
Additional Tools & Materials
- One or more high-temp hot glue guns
- A heat gun
- A bulk pack of Hot Glue sticks (You're gonna need LOTS of glue)
- A log, mirror, or other base for your mushrooms
- Preserved moss for hiding the wires
- A soldering iron OR a tiny flathead screwdriver for connecting the lights
Page last edited December 05, 2025
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