Buying A Craft Magnifying Lamp
Crafts are a great way to express your creative side and they are something that most of us would like to continue doing for a long time to come. Unfortunately our bodies can let us down a bit.
A lot crafts like needlework, jewellery making, model making etc involve doing close up and fiddly work. One of the parts of the body that tends to decline quite early on are the eyes. By our late forties many people have started to develop that extremely annoying condition - presbyopia.
Even if you have always had good eyesight sometime in your forties you are likely to notice that focusing on near objects is becoming a problem as you lose the ability to change the focus from far to near and back. That's when you start doing that moving your book back and forth trying to get it into a position where it's in focus.
The problem is made worse by the fact that by the time you're over 40 you need 20% more light to see well than you did when you were 30. By the time you're over 50 this figure has climbed to 50% and still rising.
Of course this can impact significantly on your craftwork. Take needlework as an example. First off you need to be able to thread the needle, not an easy task at the best of times but once your eyesight begins to deteriorate it becomes a real battle.
By using a craft magnifying lamp you'll be able to place the needle under the lens and see that tiny hole. And once you've threaded the needle you can place the lens in a convenient position so that you can see the material you are sewing. If you do cross stitch you'll know how difficult it can be to locate the right hole. By using a magnifying lamp you see all those holes nice and large even on fine Aida material.
But it's not just the magnification that makes craft magnifying lamps so useful. Being a lamp there is also a light that will shine brightly on your work giving you that extra bit of light you need to see well and avoid eyestrain.
You can find various types of bulbs in craft lamps but the best by far are the magnifying lamps with daylight bulbs. They give a wide, natural range of light. Instead of a dingy yellow you'll find the light white and clear. If you struggle to tell cream threads from near white threads a daylight craft magnifying lamp will make all the difference and they are the best type for avoiding that eyestrain.
For most craftwork a craft magnifying lamp with a 3 Dioptre (1.75x) lens will be more than sufficient. A lens that is 5 to 7 inches is a good size. Many lamps are designed to clamp onto a table or desk. If you like to relax in your armchair you can buy some with bases so you can place it on a near by table or you can buy floor magnifying lamps instead.