Lampshade re-do!

For a few weeks now, I’ve been working on re-doing my two youngest boys’ room. The rooms in our house are teeny tiny, one of the only drawbacks to this house and one we decided we could live with. Of course my 7 yr old is counting the months and days until our oldest leaves for college and he’ll finally get his own room. Meanwhile, I’m left to try and arrange and decorate a bedroom that will grow with a soon to be 8 and 6 yr old.

Here's a hint of the colors and theme I decided to go with.

I’m finally nearing the end, the major work has been finished and I’ve started on the accessories. Nearly 2 years ago, I picked up a cute little lamp with a pretty lame looking lampshade. Everyone says recovering lampshades is easy so I figured I’d give it a go. Of course as soon as I got it home I started thinking that sounded like a pretty big project and what if I screw it up so there it sat behind the desk in my workroom (and out of David’s sight…).
Yesterday I decided it was do or die, and mess up or not, I had to give it a try. WOW, I have to admit, if I’d realized how easy it was to recover a lampshade I would have recovered every single one in my house long ago! With drying time, this literally took less than an hour. The majority of the time was spent watching the glue dry.

Here are the supplies I gathered:
Lamp
Spray Tack
Newspaper (for pattern)
Scissors
Trim
Paper used to cover (fabric would also work)

First I outlined a template of the lampshade on a piece of newspaper to make the pattern I would need to cut the polka-dot paper. I then used the template to trace and cut the piece of paper needed for my new lamp shade cover. Next I sprayed the back of my polka-dot paper with spray tack (this stuff was amazing!) and starting at one end I simply attached it to the old lampshade. This took a bit of adjusting; the angle can be a bit tricky to work with. With the magic of spray tack, you can adjust the paper multiple times because it’s repositionable. Once the paper was applied to my liking, I pressed and smoothed until all the air bubbles were removed. Lastly, I applied modge-podge to the top of the paper to seal it from dust, dirt, and handprints. To give it a finished look, I dug through my box of vintage trims and found a beautiful piece of gray satin binding tape that will fit the colors of the room perfectly.

So my $2 garage sale lamp was recovered at a cost of less than $1 to make this one of the cheapest make-over I have ever performed.