Saturday, November 12, 2011

Lamp ReVamp!!


Well, my mom is in town for 2 whole weeks! Craft projects galore! She is also teaching me how to sew, score :)
We started off the week by brain storming all the different projects we wanted to take on. 5 pillows, a baby's bedding set and a lamp shade later we were ready to hit the stores. I decided to just work on the lamp shade project and one pillow. No need to out do ourselves. I mean, I am SO NOT THE TYPE OF PERSON TO TAKE ON MORE THAN I COULD HANDLE!!! :)

First up is the LAMP SHADE OF AWESOMENESS!! About 2 months ago I bought my first "not-just-for-reading-no-bendy-neck-lamp" from Target on clearance!! Good lookin & cheap....my kind of find!

Here is the BEFORE pic....not horrible, I obviously love the base, but it needed a little extra {VA-VA-voom}!!

I found the idea on Pinterest. Shocker. On my "Craft*Bliss" board I have about 10 different ideas for giving a lamp shade an extra little touch of greatness. So many to choose from... and I finally chose This One, from Pinterest, which lead me to U-Create {the site I used for my wreath} , which lead me to the burlap lamp shade tutorial from Mama Says Sew.....oh the wonderfully small world of DIY blogging!! 

Here is the picture from the tutorial....

Isn't that one of the coolest pictures of a lamp EVER?? 

Let me start off with I LOVE LOVE LOVE how my lamp turned out. BUT my lack of camera skills just doesn't give it justice! One day....right? 

Well....HERE WE GO :)

Supplies....
3 yards of burlap
scissors
hot glue gun/sticks
iron & ironing board
measuring tape

This is a VERY cheap project....like $5 dollars cheap!! 

First you are going to wrap your burlap around the lamp shade and secure it with hot glue. Just around the top and bottom, and pull it pretty taught.
You can see I wasn't very precise and just kind of cut where I thought it would fit....I didn't take in to account that my barrel lamp shade was slightly larger at the bottom...and it didn't quite fit. As Rick Perry would say "OOPS" :)
I just cut a little piece that covered my imperfection. At first I was worried that it would show through, but as I  was adding the ruffles, it hid it all very well!
Once you get it covered you will need to take the excess and and glue it to the inside of the shade

At this point I was burning myself more that I was being productive, so I started using a butter knife, and it worked like a charm
When it came to the metal form, I just cut the burlap and glued around it
So, once you have the lamp shade covered, folded, glued and tucked you are going to want to start cutting strips.

First, you need to take some measurements: 
When cutting the strips you will want to do the length 1.5 the length of your lamp. So in my case I cut mine 15 inches
BTW...my mom helped me cut all of my strips. Although this is a very cheap & easy project, it was pretty time consuming.... so THANKS MOM!!!!

The next measurement is for the width of the ruffle. The tutorial I used said to do 3 inches {which would leave you a 1.5 inch ruffle off the lamp}. So basically you can have the ruffle however big you want....just double it because we will later fold it in half.
Now for all the cutting! The easiest way to cut burlap is to find the string at you measurement and pull it out...
Doing this gives you.....

and you just cut down those lines!! It makes cutting burlap in a straight line possible!!

Once you cut your strip you will want to fray the ends a little bit.
So, once you have your strips cut you are going to fold & iron them in half, burrito style.


and there are your strips! 

Now for the fun part!! I started by just gluing a ruffle in a swirl down the shade. I made sure that the ends were glued down very well. 
I did this about every 3 inches...
Sometimes my ruffles got a little crazy, and didn't quite make it to the end of the shade...
When this happened, I just made sure that when I was filling the gaps, I started my next ruffle in the empty space

From here on out it was just about filling in the empty spaces. A few things I made sure to do was to make sure the ruffles whet in different directions. The arrow below shows an empty space, and then filling it!



When starting out, I would put the glue on the strip and then make the swirl, but as the space got tighter I would burn myself a lot more...:/ Boo. So I just started putting the glue directly on the shade, both ways are fine...just letting you know what my issues were :)
So, after several hours of doing this it was starting to look amazing!! Woo HOO!!!
Towards the end I was finding a few spaces that only needed small strips, which was good because I used ALL my 3 yards of burlap and towards the end my strips were not long enough to make 15 inches. So I would just cut a lot of short strips to fill in the smaller gaps.
Then just give it a few twirls and check for any missed spots and then FINI!!! 
Here is my wonderfully awesome addition to our living room!! It even got the Hil & Mo approval {Hil's being sometimes difficult to get ;) haha}




Here is its actual location. A wonderful accent to our purple wall :)
Definitely my favorite project I've taken on & super easy!! Thanks for checking it out :) Can't wait to see all of ya'lls wonderful Lamp ReVamps!! 


5 comments:

Steps said...

Love the tutorial, Mal!!!

Sandie Graves said...

How CUTE is this? I love it and it looks like it was a fun and do-able project. Thanks for sharing :-)

Anonymous said...

very cute! where did you get your burlap?

Mal said...

Thanks guys!

Kallie- I just got it at H-Lob :) I used a 40% off for it also, but I think normally it is $3.99/ yard. And I totally just did the math and it MAY have cost a little more than $5...haha OOPS!! So about $7.50...I bought several things and didn't even double check. I'm a dork!

S. said...

Hi! I added your nice tuto in my blog!

Sara

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