LED Christmas Lights & Me

So this past weekend I attended what I'm sure will only be the first "Christmas Sweater Party" of the year. At any rate, somehow I got the idea in my head that it would be a fantastic idea to try and install some Christmas lights on the sweater this year. Good idea right? I thought so. Well as it turns out, I'm not an electrician.


My brilliant idea was to buy a set of Christmas lights, and somehow rewire them to run off of dc current (batteries) instead of ac current (plugging them into the wall.) I found this nifty little site which I thought was going to help me with my mission, unfortunately things only got more complicated from here on out.

I learned that with LED lights, red, orange, and yellow run on a different voltage than green, blue, and white. Since I bought multicolored lights, I had to completely cut up and destroy a once perfectly lovely strand of Christmas lights and splice the right colors back together. Victory will be mine! Except not really. After further reading on that 'helpful' website, I learned that the author used voltage based on rechargeable batteries and not regular coppertops like I had purchased. Okay no biggie, I'll just use 2 less batteries to reach the same amount of total power for my strand. Eureka! A quick half-second blip of light and then.....nada. I give up. The lights beat me.....but I will be back!

Some construction pics for your viewing pleasure:

Still made it to the party though!