Doing Stuff is Fun: Lampshade makeovers

See this light. See what's wrong with it? Now, consider the fact that we've lived in this house for seven months. Still not finished getting the place sorted, obviously, hence no light-shade.

But we struck some luck the other day. We found these, just outside on the street. Someone had obviously left them out for the bin men, who neglected to take them. So we did.

Once we got them inside and looked at them, we figured out why they'd been thrown away. Not having a clue how to clean them, I decided to tear the covers off and re-cover them myself.

For the first one I took out my fabric scraps and I selected this blue stuff. It's quite a dark colour, but it's shiny too, and thin so it won't be too shadowy.

I made a pattern on some baking paper by tracing around one of the segments in my frame. If you're going to copy me on this, you want to trace on the outside of the section, not inside it, so you can wrap the pieces around the wire.

I pinned my pattern to the fabric and cut out a piece for each section in the frame.

Then I got some all purpose glue and stuck the pieces in place. I did four alternating ones first, and glued them around the wire.

Then I did the other four so they were folded at the outside edge (to make it look neat).

I glued the bottom edge last and it turned out I hadn't quite cut my pieces big enough so parts of the frame were still showing at the bottom.

No matter, I've found something to cover it up with.

For my second shade I wanted to do something different. I did a little Internet hunt for ideas and came across this (picture is a link). It's quite an interesting technique using starch, which means you can make multiple shades from one mould.

I didn't follow their tutorial though; I just thought I could stretch something over my frame and glue it in place, so I set out to find something that would look pretty when stretched. I found this lovely scarf in the 99p store. It's one of those that's like a tunnel, which is why I chose it.

I put the tunnel scarf over my frame like so, and glued it to the bottom of the frame.

Once that had dried (about ten minutes) I stretched the scarf upwards as much as I could and I snipped the top off. Then I glued it around the top of the frame.