Festoon Lights To Illuminate Your Summer Evenings

Now that the weather is improving, and we all start to get our gardens ready for the long summer evenings, we look at some illuminating ways to make the most of your garden this summer. You’ve already got the garden furniture, the chiminea is primed, and if you’ve been lucky enough to get hold of one, you may very well have a hot tub to relax in as the sun goes down. However, once the sun finally disappears beyond the horizon, we all tend to drift back indoors, ending our enjoyment of the garden for the evening – but it doesn’t have to be that way!

Exterior lighting has come a long way in recent years and one of the most popular trends is vintage festoon lighting. Festoon lights offer an inexpesive and stunning way to light your outdoor space, giving you much more time to enjoy the garden well after the sun goes down.

Custom Festoon Lighting

There are a wide variety of options available when ordering festoon lighting, including different bulb shapes, colours and sizes, and connectable cables or continuous belts. However, to really make your lighting unique, there are some vendors that offer custom-fitted festoon lights, allowing you to have them tailored to suit the space you plan to illuminate. This is the ideal option as it means you have no excess wiring to view and are not forced to increase the number of bulbs in a smaller area, overlighting the space when off-the-shelf versions are too long.

There’s also no need for expensive re-wiring or custom power sockets, as festoon light fittings are made to be compatible with standard home wall sockets. All you need to do is simply plug them in and enjoy the gentle ambience the lights provide.

Festoon Lighting Poles & Fittings

If you have an outside dining area, it can be tempting to build a pagoda or vine frame to provide a secure, raised fixing for your new festoon lights. If this is your preference, then you can use common electrical cable fixings (available from any hardware store) to secure your light belt to the frame. However, there is no need to go to such expense – many vendors also sell special festoon light poles which are designed to hoist the cable into the air, foregoing the requirement for a more permanent structure. The festoon lighting poles also provide a quaint aesthetic to the lights, as the cables droop gently between poles, creating soft arcs between fixings. The poles themselves, simply press into the ground and can be separated into smaller sections for easy storage.

How To Measure Festoon Lighting

It is important to bear in mind when ordering your new festoon lights that you allow enough cable to reach your power socket. Most festoon vendors offer a standard 2m long power cable, however, you may want to specify a greater length to ensure your plug reaches the socket. This is not a massive conundrum and is easy to overcome if you forget to specify a particular length power cord – but it is worth discussing this with the vendor before you place your order, especially if you want to avoid having unsightly extension cords trailing across your garden.  There are loads of vendors that would be willing to do this for you – I ordered my garden lights from Festoon Lighting who went out of their way to make sure we had the right bulbs, correctly spaced of course, and the right length power cable to reach the sockets. The result is a stunning outside seating area that now gets lots of use on dry evenings, whether it is hot or cold! After all, “there’s no such thing as bad weather… only the wrong clothes”.