Recovering a Lamp Shade

Once again- and I know I'm not alone here-my decorating decision came down to budget. I knew I wanted two matching lamps for the bedside tables. I had left our old lamps with the condo when we sold it furnished.  I had scored the set of vintage orange lamps with shades including shipping to Nunavut for under $150 from ebay.

For our new apartment I knew I wanted everything to be a little less colourful and have a little less pattern. I already had new white bedding and curtains and was looking for a colourful lamps to start my colour scheme. Initially, I like these faceted lamps from Robert Abbey...

But at $166 plus shipping per lamp it was out of my price range. The Land of Nod is also a great resource for lighting even though it's suppose to be a children's store. They had some fun lamps I was considering like these two:

Yellow lamp $137 and white $79

Still not a bad deal but once you factor in shipping+handling and duty+customs/brokerage it was more than I wanted to spend. While browsing HomeSense I found the two lamps that are now in my bedroom for roughly $50 each- I think they are on sale now too. The only thing I didn't like about them was their off-white or beige lamp shade. I felt it really clashed with the white lamp. Here is a really bad before picture Chad took with his phone (as you can see decorating is very tiring). It really looks so bland without the grey wall and the addition of some pattern.

After searching around for replacement shades I realized they would cost more than the lamps themselves. These two options from etsy are both more than the $50 lamps.

From Sweet Dream Shades

From CruelMountain

I decided I would just cover the lamp shades in fabric so I went to my standby source-ebay. I found a great ebay seller who had a large selection of ikat fabric. It was cheap, shipped quickly and is beautiful in person, what more can you ask for. Here is a sampling of some of the selection. I feel another project coming on-or maybe just a scarf.

There are so many resources online now. I just search for one that looks the least complicated like the best fit. I loosely followed this one from Blissfully Ever After. I didn't really measure since my fabric was almost a perfect fit width wise to the shade (I also hate measuring). I used spray adhesive and then rolled the fabric onto the shade. It took a few times to reposition it and then smooth out any wrinkles. I used fabric glue to glue down the excess fabric to the inside of the lampshade. To give it a more finished look I used grey trim and glued it to the inside of the shade where the fabric and shade met. That was it. It probably only took me a half hour start to finish. Enough time and money left over to have some wine and admire my handy-work.