Although my lamp didn't turn out exactly as I intended it, I was actually pretty happy with the end result. Not so much the final product, but feeling like I had at least tried to bring a creative vision to life. There were a lot of lessons that I learned while trying to make this, and they were lessons I could pretty much only learn by trying and failing. Embracing failure is pretty freeing. I feel more motivated to keep trying in the future to tackle fabrication projects, simply to see what I can learn in the process. Hopefully I can make cool stuff while I'm at it, but even if I don't, I know there will be something else that I can try, and I'll only get better at making them.