Appliqué Lampshades

I have been meaning to recover 2 plain lampshades I had for our gym for a while and recently got round to doing it. I knew I wanted a mountain-scape as eventually I want to paint a mountain motif on the wall and I challenged myself to use only materials I already had.

First, I created a template by drawing round the lampshades onto a sheet of wrapping paper, which was the only paper I had long enough! I marked the start of the lampshade at the seam and rolled it slowly along the white side of the wrapping paper with one hand, drawing with the other as I went. This was a little tricky but doable.

After cutting out the template with a 1 cm seam allowance all the way round, I placed it on a white duvet and cut out 2 lampshade shapes. Then I found a pair of old grey camouflage cargo shorts which were perfect for my mountains. I freehand cut out lots of triangles of various shapes and smaller triangles with jagged bottoms for some snow covered peaks.

I used bondaweb to secure the mountains to the lampshade material with a 1 cm gap for the seam allowance at the bottom. If I did this again, I would place the mountains in the middle of the template as I love machine embroidery and had planned to use this to attach the mountains…But being so close to the edge meant I couldn’t use the right size embroidery hoop for the machine, so I hand stitched the mountains and snow caps on.

Next, I used spray-on CFC-free fabric glue to attach the fabric to the lampshade, going very slowly and stretching it tight as I went to avoid wrinkles. I then went over the top and bottom with a glue gun to ensure it was secure.

To cover the glue left by the gun, I cut some ribbon I had to trim the inside bottom edge for neatness. I’m pretty happy with the result and would love to see your upcycled lampshades – please comment below.

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