Wednesday, October 10, 2012

I Love Lamp

We have this lamp.  I guess I liked it when I bought it for our apartment.  It was one of those $10 or $15 Better Homes & Gardens lamps from Walmart.  Nothing spectacular.  At the time I bought it, it matched our living room.  But now, since we've gotten rid of all the pink and burgundy (aside from our throw blanket, still working on that) the lamp didn't really match.
I didn't take an actual before picture of the lamp, but there it is over by the couch.  No, it's not really the right size for the living room, but it works for now.  And I knew it would work much better with a different lampshade.  Since I'm cheap, I knew it would be way more cost effective to buy some fabric and just redo it.  I've redone lampshades in the past and been fairly successful.
That lampshade (I have a pair of them) started out life as a white shade, lined with a blue geometric print.  I ripped the whole thing apart and with the help of some bbq skewers, redid it.

Anyway, back to the living room lamp.  There was trim around the top and bottom part of the shade that was just glued on.  So I ripped that off.  Then the rest of the fabric was on there pretty securely.  There was the burgundy on the outside then it had a white lining.  I left the white lining because it would go with the new fabric.  I cut the burgundy fabric off.  Initially I thought I would just use fabric glue to attach the new fabric.  That ended up taking too long to dry so I busted out the hot glue gun, much better.

So I hot glued the fabric on.  To give it a more finished look, I used brown striped ribbon around the bottom and the top.  For the top, I glued the ribbon so it was about halfway on the shade then I folded the other half over into the inside of the shade.  On the bottom, I just glued the edge of the ribbon to the bottom of the lamp shade.  I love it.  And the best part, it only cost me $1.  I just bought one of the little pieces of quilting fabric that's like 18"x21"  It was a little small but I was able to make it work.  And it's so much better than the old shade.


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