DIY – Recovering Lamp Shades with Fabric

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Guest post by Anna Bruce

My husband and I just moved into our first home and I’m having so much fun decorating it! But as many young couples, just starting out, we are flat broke. So no extra moolah to spend on fancy, smancy shades. Enter Pinterest! I was browsing around Pinterest when I found a tutorial on recovering lamp shades with fabric. “BRILLIANT!” I thought to myself! So, off I go to Fabric.com to get some material. It was a total “God thing” that I just happened to find a great lamp at a yard sale for $5! It was in great shape, it was just in a hideous gold color. So I spray painted the lamp with white paint first. Then it was on to the shade…
Well, as most of my experiences with Pinterest projects go, they never quite look like the tutorial photos. So I was getting frustrated when I was trying to wrap the fabric around my drum shade and it wouldn’t lay straight because the shade was slightly smaller at the top than at the bottom. So, I decided to make strips of fabric and lay them on top of each other for this project.

The first thing you need to do is remove the lining from the top and bottom of the shade to ensure a smooth work surface.

Next you need to cut pieces of the fabric, then iron down the edge of one side of the fabric. Then hot glue the fabric down. I only glued down the edges, not the middle.

Then, just keep on doing that all the way around the shade. Your seams should look something like this (Maybe yours will look a little cleaner).

This is what it should look like when you’re done

Next I wanted to add some trim to the top and bottom. I found this adorable trim on fabric.com for just $.98/yard! So I hot glued it all the way around the top and bottom edges of the shade.

This is the final product!

I loved how it turned out! I am definitely going to try this on some other lamps in the future. Just do me a favor and make your life so much simpler by buying a drum shade that is the same size at the top as it is at the bottom! It will make your project much quicker!

Anna Bruce can be found snapping photos and having the time of her life being creative over at  Anna Bruce Photography. She is the sister of Jennifer @ Conversaving.