I picked up this lamp some time ago at the Goodwill. Actually the base came from Goodwill and I found the lampshade in the clearance section at Marshall's and paired it with the lamp. The oval shade paired nicely with the round base. I immediately spray-painted it silver (wish it had been more chrome like, but that's another story) bought an elegant finial and called it a day. And that's how it's lived it's life for the past five years.
I don't know about you, but when my budget gets tight is when I stop buying things and actually get some of the projects I need to do done. So I revisited my silver lamp.
Somewhere I saw in a magazine a lamp shade that matched its base in color. I thought, well that's easy enough I'll just paint the lampshade silver. Now I probably could have used any silver metallic craft paint that I had laying around, but since Shade has a linen fabric texture, I researched and found a fabric paint in the shade of silver. I couldn't find it at any of the local stores so I ordered it online from Joannes.
Before painting, I used a mild cleaner (even dish soap would do) and a lint free cloth and wipe down the shade to get off any loose dirt and dust.
Then using a foam brush I simply used long linear strokes to paint the lampshade.
It took about four coats to get the color even.
As you know craft paint dries fairly quickly so I was able to let it dry in between the coat and still be finished within about 30 minutes.
Looks good right? But wait, look how it appears with the light turned on.
You could stop here at all you wanted was a painted lampshade tutorial. But as you can see the shade is less than opaque when the light is on. While this did allow for light to filter through the now painted lampshade, I was less than impressed by the visible paint stroke marks it also allowed. So I thought well I'll line the inner part of the shade. I wanted to make it a metallic finish to reflect the light bulb when the lamp was on. My first thought was to use a silver leafing product. But after picking one up at Michael's I noticed that the sizing or glue was highly flammable. I didn't want to take any chances with the lightbulb so close to the silver lead, so I scrapped that idea.
After walking around the store looking for inspiration (some of the best ideas are born this way) I finally settled on using a foiled card stock paper I found in the scrap book paper section. Just my luck too it was on sale for $.99 a sheet. My thought was I could use some type of adhesive to adhere the paper to the inside of the shade. I picked up four just to make sure I had enough to make it all around the shade and rushed home to finish my lampshade.
I pulled out this adhesive tape that I had picked up at a dollar store, did a dry fit on the lampshade and was just about to install it when the dangerous mind of a crafter took over. I thought I could install the paper and it would look just fine but what if I ran through my cricut. I mean what can I lose a dollar? I answered my own question by choosing a frilly pattern I had on an existing cartridge (picturesque) and made a test pattern.
After screwing up one of the sheets, by using too small of a pattern, I realized that an oversized image would work best.
Here's how I installed it with the mounting tape.
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