covering a lampshade

so these little lampshade projects are all over the blogosphere and look simple enough, right? well, i had a some serious trouble with actually getting this thing finished. it took me weeks and i'm usually way too crazy to let things go for weeks unfinished. i'm totally blaming it on the baby.

it all started with this ginormous lampshade from ikea. i'm pretty sure lampshades are the hardest things to move. seriously. ours have gotten crushed everytime we've moved. i'm obviously not packing them right. so we picked up this big shade from ikea to replace one that got crushed but then it didn't fit the lamp. and then i lost the receipt. so it sat there on the guest bed forever before i realized that it could probably fit over the awesome, 80's, apt grade fixture we had going on over our table. and then it sat for some more while i tried to work up the energy to actually start this project.

excuse the horrible pictures. i'm more writing this so if i ever try this again, i won't forget how to fix all the mistakes i made.

first, i taped a bunch of newspaper together and traced the shape of the shade onto the paper. i might have done this 3 times before i got it right. again, blaming it on the baby.

cut it out

and tried it on for size. woohoo! this one finally, sorta fits

fabric was a whole other hold-up on this project. i finally settled on this suuuuper cheap blue from hobby lobby after i realized there was a pretty good chance of me messing this up. it's not my favorite shade of blue, but it goes with the curtains we already had and it actually looks better with the light shining through it. so i pinned my pattern on and cut it out, leaving tons on the edges 'cause i was so nervous.

i used my favorite sticky spray to get the fabric on (don't fear for baby - it was a well venilated area and i had extra fabric wrapped around my head as a mask. real cute.) i love this stuff because i can just pull it up and start over when i messed up. lesson learned - you can spray too much of it and get dark spots through solid fabric. thankfully, it ends up that you can't see them when the light shines through.

i just sprayed the edges under too, but now i wish that i'd just cut them even with the edge of the shade. at this point though, i had no idea how i was going to finish the edges, so this worked.

i ended up making some far from perfect bias tape that's not really cut on the bias for the edges. don't be jealous of my golf-towel-on-the-counter ironing board.

then i hot glued it on. once i hung it up, i realized how bad the inside edge looked, so i made one more strip and hot glued it to the inside edge.

so to the fun part:

before:
i gotta a little antsy and forgot to take a before pic, but just imagine this on a gold chain. it was lovely.

and after:


not perfect, but much, much better.
now james is figuring out if we could spray paint that gold chain without taking it out of the ceiling and without our landlord noticing...