Monday, December 13, 2010

DIY Garden Lampshade

So here is the shpeal... I saw this garden lampshade at Anthropologie and loved it and was inspired from it... I had a plain cream cloth lampshade at home and I thought...hmmmm... I could spruce it up a bit... and so I called my friend Dani and begged for her help since craft stores scare me and I don't know what to do when I go into one... so she came with me, and this is what we came up with... we used the cheapest material we could find... felt... and we bought a few squares of different colors... some green yarn (she already had some yellow), and she already had a glue gun and a sewing machine so we were set there... and we went to town... in this manner...
1st we cut out flower shapes... the perfect circle flowers were done with my friend Dani's various sizes of dye cuts, but we free-handed the spiky flowers and the leaves, and the middles of the flowers were either knotted strips of felt we glued on or knotted pieces of yarn.  Some flowers we tried to make 3 dimensional by bunching them in the middle, some flowers we sewed detail on (and same with the leaves) and we sewed at least a tack in the middle of each flower to hold them together... and you probably get the idea...
 The perfectly good and nice lampshade before we glued the heck out of it...
 This is the manner in which we designed what the lampshade would look like... we measured the height and circumference and then mimicked that on the floor and made our design. We also ate m & m's to help us think better... highly recommended...
 We then glued our first flower... and got confident and glued the rest...
We then used spray adhesive to spray pieces of yarn to make the stems... this was the hardest part because it stuck to our hands so bad but we managed and it worked!
And this is the finished project posing on Dani's cute lamp...
 A close up of some of the detail...


And the lampshade resting on its rightful stand in my house...
And thats it! It only takes 6 hours! HAHA... which is a LONG time... but its worth it... you initially will have gluers remorse because it was a perfectly nice lampshade without all the flowers on it, but then you will start to love it because its funky and fun and gives your room pop.  Anyway, give it a try, copy it if you like or you don't have to like it at all... just thought I'd share (most the pictures are courtesy of Dani's camera).

1 comment:

Julie said...

so, so, so cute Liza!