Recovering a Lamp Shade

Remember my childhood dresser redo? I mentioned that I've been redecorating our guest room and that is where the dresser is, but I also needed a lamp to provide some mood lighting to my guests. Today I want to share with you this cute lamp that I painted and recovered.

Don't get scared. If *I* can recover a lamp shade, so can you! I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I love how it turned out. I'm hoping I can shed some light (pun intended) on the subject for you.

This is what the lamp started out looking like.

I taped off the electrical components of the lamp and gave it a nice spray with light yellow paint.

I used the lamp shade to trace and make a pattern. I kind of rolled it as I traced. I didn't have a lot of fabric to work with, I was using a scrap that I found in the remnants bin at the store, that's why I decided to go with the making-the-pattern-approach.

This is what my pattern ended up looking like. Depending on your lamp shade, yours will look different. My pattern is for 2 sides of my lamp, so I knew I would have to cut out 2 pieces of fabric using this pattern.

I cut out my fabric with a little help from Choco. (She has a habit of always making herself comfortable on the exact area of fabric I need to work with. She is too cute to kick off.)

Use some spray adhesive to attach the fabric to the old lamp shade.

Remember how I was working with a small amount of fabric? Because I had 2 pieces of fabric, I had to seam up my edges, but it was easy, I just folded the ends under to finish them off and used the spray adhesive.

The top and bottom are going to have all kinds of crazy fly-away fabric. This is ok. I will show you how to finish it off.

Trim the excess fabric.

Now use bias tape and hot glue it around the edges to finish it off.

Smooth it down and make sure it stays put!

It was really pretty easy!

I have a few more finishing touches to put on the guest room and then I will let you see it! I am also still working on a spray booth tutorial. Good things come to those who wait...

I will link to these parties this week. How fun!