A decorative way to hide appliance LEDs

At the moment I'm effectively living out of one room- the joys of being a student.  As a result, I have a TV set up- being able to sit and watch movies in bed is great, particularly if you feel sick.  Recently I bought a hard drive recorder for my set up (I was actually intending to buy an external hard drive for my computer but the recorder was such a good deal I... missed).  It's a nice little device- a few annoying tricks, but for $130 I can live with them.

But there is one feature that I cannot stand.  One that causes irritation and frustration at a glance.  One feature that causes me to rant to any and all who will listen.  The dreaded 'blue LED of uselessness'.  You have probably all got something that has this feature- a device with a light to light up, not when it is doing something, or when it is on (although if it is something like a TV there should not be a light needed to show it is on, it should be flaming obvious!).  No, it is the light that lights up to show that something is NOT on.  And on my particular device it seems bright enough at night to guide airplanes in to land.  This is a bad thing if you need total dark to sleep like I do- even the bedside clock has to be covered. And let's not even talk about the horror that was a camp where I was stuck with the top bunk, my nose about 50 cm from the massive EXIT sign that, of course, could not be turned off.

My solution?  To craft an opaque object to over the light and solve the problem for good.  To do this I cut some sticky backed felt I had to an appropriate size.  Step one- hold the felt in position and test that the remote will still work.  If the remote sensor is next to the glowing light you'll need to either have some fancy cutting or give up and go mad (er).

Step two:  Well you could just stick the felt down and call it job done but where's the fun in that?  Yesterday I was playing with making celtic knots.  I have a book that turned out to be confusingly useless that I had bought on holiday in Ireland last year, but what I found really helpful was the site Free Macrame Patterns which also had a section on celitc and chinese knots.  A little playing around and I had a few to choose from.

This I stuck onto my felt, along with another piece of white felt to give the knot-work a nicer background to show it off.  Bit of craft glue later and here's the result:

And here is the finished product at work

If you don't want to risk sticky felt you could use cardboard as your base and Blu-tack to hold it in position. I would not try using Blu-tack directly on felt, it doesn't work very well.  Use felt glued to card backing if you want to go the Blue-tack route.  And there are all sorts of ways you could decorate your blocker- embroidery, ribbons, beads, glitter, stamps, your prized collection of toenail clippings, whatever.

Or you could use a piece of plain black card.  But where's the fun in that?