Sunday, November 29, 2009

Lamp redo

Hey there! I thought I would rejoin the blogging world, after a looong time off. It seems like over the past few months we have gone from busy to busier and now things "seem" to be calming down a bit. We recently moved to a new home and have been doing some painting and decorating and I thought I would share a lamp redo that I made for our upstairs hallway. This was sooo cheap and incredibly simple. Oh, and fun, too! So here is how I did it and some pics to go with it....

I found this lamp at a store that was going out of business, so it was dirt cheap as well as UGLY!!! Seriously. I forgot to take the before pic, but it was painted yellow and green...nuf said!! haha



I started by spray-painting the lamp. It only took one coat and I did not even have to use a primer for it. I went with a matte finish instead of a shiny one, since to me, shiny can sometimes look cheap.



I also found this lampshade that was horribly stained and had this really yucky green border on the edges. I peeled the border off and...




this caused the entire lampshade to no longer be attached to this metal support. So I spray painted that part as well and when it was dry, I carefully re-attached it to the lampshade with some clear tape.



I didn't get a picture of this part, but I basically traced the lampshade with a pencil on a brown piece of paper, by starting at the seam and rolling it all the way around until I arrived back at the seam. After that, I added an extra inch on all sides for seam allowance. Then I cut the pattern out and pinned it to my material. After that I carefully cut it out and before anything else, wrapped it around my lampshade to make sure that it had been cut out correctly and would fit around my shade.



I then folded one end of my material over and ironed it.



Then,using a glue gun, I carefully glued first the top and then the bottom edges of the material over the lamp. I have seen where some people use spray adhesive and that might be a tad easier, but the only one I could find was 9 euro!!! The glue gun worked just fine, too. I had to cut along the edges as I glued, to be sure that the material would lay flat as it went around. This is what the inside of the shade looked like....



And here is the finished product! I had originally thought of adding a trim to the bottom of the shade, but liked how this turned out and didn't really think that it needed it. So, there you go. Hopefully this has inspired you to go out and try it out for yourself!