Upcycled Lamp & Shade

Some projects are a joy -- they take off from the start and keep you working all the way to the end. But it isn't always that way. Take this lamp and lampshade, for example. It started at the Target clearance rack last fall. The lamp was about $7 and the shade was even less. That's a good price for a lamp of OK quality, so I decided to make a project out of it.

Supplies

The lamp was a weird shade of yellow. A puke yellow, not a cheery yellow. I used some matte white spray paint to take care of that problem. The shade was a different story. I tried spray painting it silver, but it was patterned and the pattern showed through no matter how many layers I put on (it was an unattractive pattern). This was very frustrating after investing $10 in silver spray paint. My total invested into the lamp was now over $20 and I still had an ugly lamp.

I remembered an article from a long-ago Martha Stewart where they recovered a lampshade using seam binding. So I bought a few packages of dark brown hem tape. However, I needed a LOT of packages to get all the way around the shade. Since each package was about $2, I estimated I could add at least $20 onto the cost of the lamp. This is where the project began to stall. Since I didn't feel like going out and paying for so many packages of hem tape, the lamp and shade sat around for a while, taking up space in my craft room. Sometimes when I was at Jo-Anns or Haberman's, I would throw a few packs of the hem tape in with my other things. But still the lamp sat.

Winding and gluing the hem tape. 

Finally, I had collected about seven packages of hem tape, so I set to work. I had to glue each end to the inside of the lamp. One pack would move me forward only a few inches. In the end, I used about twelve packages of tape. There were other problems, too. One of the hem tape packages was a slightly different shade of brown than the others. Another pack had a defective edge. I just ignored these things because by this time, I just wanted the project done.

Finally finished.