It may be blog suicide to mention a craft fail this early on in my blogging life, but I can’t continue with this on my conscience – I had a lampshade catastrophe over the weekend.
It all began so innocently: a girl (me), a thrift store, a shapely brass lamp . . . but little did we know that the joy we all felt at stumbling upon one another in this crazy world would be short-lived. Oh sure, there was the honeymoon period during the priming and painting of the lamp – the lime green gloss spray paint behaved better than expected, the painter’s tape successfully sealed the forbidden zones, and no unfortunate paint-in-the-hair episodes occurred. Good times.
Next step was the lampshade. Oh, I found one easily enough – I tried Lowe’s with no luck but one more stop at Lamps Plus was all it took. I took that mother home, fantasizing all the way about how awesome it was going to look wearing the excellent fabric I already had on hand! I felt like the planets were lining up just for this lamp to happen! So with hope in my heart, I stood at my ironing board on Saturday night (yes, my life IS that exciting) figuring out how to make it happen.
It turned out I only had a fat quarter of the chosen fabric, so I decided to just do a stripe of fabric around the shade instead of covering the whole thing. That would have been great, except that I discovered, to my horror, that I DID NOT HAVE A DRUM SHADE. If you’ve ever covered a lampshade, you feel my pain right about now – the top of the shade was slightly smaller than the bottom, which meant that a strip of fabric would not go evenly around it. As if that weren’t bad enough, the pattern repeat would not allow me to use the part of the design I wanted, and I didn’t have enough fabric for the stripe to go where I wanted it, around the widest part. But I was undaunted! I forged ahead and cut and pressed and sewed and tested and even though I had no idea what I was doing, I started sewing tiny pleats in the top of the fabric every so often until it looked like it would lay right.
It took some serious intestinal fortitude to continue at this point, but I was determined to see it through. So, armed with my trusty can of spray adhesive, I began to spray and stick the fabric onto the shade. After considerable maneuvering, I thought I had gotten most of the wrinkles out as I stretched that material to within an inch of its life and it finally met at the seam.
I popped it on top of the lamp and walked away. I was pretty sick of looking at it by then, and I wasn’t completely happy with the way it turned out, but I thought maybe if I “snuck up on it” its appeal might surprise me.
Yeah . . . that didn’t happen. Then I opened the blinds the next morning and the wrinkles appeared in all their glory.
I tried to fix the wrinkles and I tried not to swear.
But when I discovered that the ENTIRE lampshade was sticky, I may have let a few indelicate words cross my lips.
I guess it could be a Post-it lampshade or something. But not if I burn it first.
