Lampshade refab

My coworker had a cute lamp in her office that another coworker left behind when she left. She loved the shape of the lamp and the shade, but the colors didn’t match the rest of her office’s blue theme with small pops of red here and there. The shade (I have no Before picture, sorry!) was covered in a bright red, orange and yellow paisley fabric.

In an attempt to redo the shade, she tore off that fabric, leaving the white backing in tact. I offered to help her refinish it because I have a problem and can’t say “no” to craft projects. So I stole her unfinished shade and took it home to make something purdy.

Here’s what I started with. Pretty bare boned, huh?

I had lots of ideas on how to redo her lamp shade. I ultimately decided to recover it with fabric because I thought it would work best in her office that way.

I grabbed a neutral fabric out of my fabric stash and started recovering the shade. I chose to use a dark stitch because I thought it would be a cute accent. I started at the top of the frame, stitching the fabric right through the white backing. I went around the top twice with the chocolate thread.

I don’t have a picture of this next step because I needed both hands to do it. Once the top was sewn onto the frame, I stretched the fabric as taut as possible around the bottom of the lamp and stitched it. Since the shade is smaller at the top, I needed extra fabric for the bottom half — this left me with an overlap of fabric. I didn’t want the unsightly seam to ruin Amy’s shade, so I added five grayish-blue flower embellishments.

For each flower, I cut a circle out of my fabric. I then pinched it in the middle and sewed it to the shade, folding the flower to get more creases as I sewed. Once each flower was on the shade, I sewed a chocolate-brown button to the middle.

I’m very surprised with how well this turned out. I thought for sure I’d be delivering bad news to Amy that I killed her lamp shade, but it’s alive and well!