Isn't it gorgeous? Of course, I did not want the actual lamp and I couldn't buy the shade without the lamp, so I took pictures and decided to make my own beautiful lamp shade! P.S. The lamp was $50. HA! There was no way I could justify that purchase.
If I were a more patient person, I would have scoured every thrift store in the vicinity for a lamp shade to use for this project and waited until I found one. Since I am pretty much the opposite of patient, I just picked up a shade from the local Wally World for $15. I probably could have saved $10 if I just waited, but hey, I'll just fore go a couple of lattes at Starbucks this week and call it even.
Lamp shade, check. Now I needed fabric. I dug through my drawers to find an old sheer white curtain that I knew I had put away safely in case I had a use for it in the future. Boy am I glad I did! Now I had fabric, shade, scissors, needle and thread, glue and that's pretty much all I needed. I put on a random movie so that I wouldn't go crazy having to cut a million circles and began the project.
I did not care if the circles were perfect, mostly because it was already taking forever to cut them...and did I mention that I'm impatient? I decided to go with four different sized circles for the flowers, the sizes were chosen arbitrarily. You can't really tell from the picture, but there are small dots of sparkliness on the fabric. :)
I am not sure how long it took to cut the circles, but let's just say I watched an entire movie and they still were not done. Apparently I am extremely slow. May I suggest you do not do this project on your microfiber couch? Mine ended up full of tiny fabric pieces. You live...you learn.
Once I had everything cut up, I formed my little flowers. This was incredibly easy to do. You place the biggest on the bottom and pile the rest on top, in order of size. I took the needle and thread and sewed them together in the middle, twisted the fabric to create a little dimension and then proceeded to sew the flower to the lamp.
Oh, I forgot to mention that before I sewed anything, I glued on a layer of fabric circles to my lamp shade as a kind of backer. My lamp shade was not white, and I did not want any of the actual shade showing through in the end.
After several hours of sewing (and gluing pieces down that were falling over - I would suggest using a thicker fabric for this project since mine was not a fan of hanging vertically), I finally finished!
All there was left to do was add the new shade to the old lamp and place it on my desk for all to see! Though this project took a lot longer than I had expected (don't they always?), I am very happy with the result and LOVE it in my living room. It's just perfect. Don't you think?
