Lampshade Making

Just a few last things to show you from our recently completed building work today...

I had a go at making some lamp shades for my Mum and Dad's sitting room. They were surprisingly quick and easy to make, and the kits compared reasonably well, price wise, with buying a ready made shade. Only this way you get to tailor make your shade to your taste and decor with your own choice of fabric/paper. I got my kits from Needcraft and I decided to use wall paper rather than fabric. I think fabric would have been slightly more fiddly to use, the wallpaper was incredibly easy, it just lay flat naturally and didn't crinkle up the way I imagine fabric might. There are lots of tutorials to guide you through the making, although the instructions are pretty simple anyway. This Cath Kidson tutorial on Utube seems like quite a clear one.

Anyway, here's my wallpaper that I used:

And here are the finished lampshades:

It's definitely something I'll try again at some point. My own sitting room lamp shades are suddenly looking very boring for a start!

And I don't think I've shown you the finished bedside lights yet either:

These fittings I bought very cheaply from IKEA (here) and they adapted really easily to a jar shade to match the rest of the lighting (here and here).

And I think the last thing to show you from the building work is how lovely my Mum's quilt looks hanging up in the bedroom.

I did originally wonder whether this wall might be a good one to turn into a patchwork wall, but then I looked at how high the ceiling is and decided that there was no way I was wallpapering all the way up there! So a simple curtain rail with a gorgeous quilt hanging over it was a good alternative, much easier! And we can change the quilt whenever we want to as well. For now, my Mum's quilt is obviously the perfect choice.

That's it for the building work. I might be back tomorrow with a photo, but I'm not sure there have been many 'moments to pause and savour' this week! Far too much rushing about instead, I might have to make a big effort to make time tomorrow morning to stop rushing around and see if a 'moment' occurs! Sally.