Pinterest Challenge: Changing Shades

I am extremely excited to be following Katie Bower and Sherry/John Petersik this time around during the second Pinterest Challenge.  You can read the details about it here.  You can view my Pinterest boards here.



Unfortunately, the timing was not perfect.  If they had only announced it a week earlier before we decided to switch to an all cash budget, I would have swiped our debit card many times to come up with the perfect Pinterest Challenge entry, probably leaving us with nothing to eat, but now that we are spending our money wisely, I had to scale down my plans.  I looked around our house for something that I’ve been waiting to makeover and saw this:



Actually, there are a few things in the photo I would love to change, but the lamp is the culprit this time around.  I’m not a fan of light walls like ours because I like white to balance color.  I generally do not like large canvases of white, but draw toward large canvases of light colors with pops of white and darker tones throughout the room.



Since we can’t change the color of the walls, I am working to bring more color into the room in other ways.  Our lamp shade pretty much blends right into the walls, so I wanted to fix that.  I set out to change the shade of our shade.  Get it?

I searched Pinterest for some inspiration and came up with this:



I know it’s not anything spectacular, but once again I was on a tight budget with little time to become inspired, so I chose to cover our lampshade with fabric.

Well, actually, since our lamp shade was much larger on the bottom than it was on the top, making it difficult to cover with fabric, I picked up a drum shade on clearance for a little over $13 at Target.



This is the fabric my hubby man and I actually agreed on (that was a first):



I started by trying to center the pattern on the shade.



Then I glued one side down in the seam of the shade and glued the other side as tightly as I could, however there was a gap since this shade has a one inch difference between the top and bottom diameters (it’s not a true drum shade where both diameters would be equal).  I fixed this later.



I glued the top around the edge of the inside.



Then, I fixed the gap in the fabric along the top.  I took out the part I glued first since the bottom was glued around the edge and holding everything in place . . .



. . . and then I pulled the left side as hard as I could so the top that is an inch smaller was snug.



Then I glued it down and the right one on top of it in a straight line so nobody would be the wiser.



I then glued the top around the edge on the inside of the shade, cutting a slit wherever the wire connected.



I plan on adding white ribbon over the parts glued to the inside of the shade because it is visible to anyone in the room if they are standing up, but I did not have white ribbon when I was making this.

Voila!



Here it is in the room:


I tend to need a few days before I like any changes I make, but Mr. Converse Sneakers likes it, so I’m hoping in time I will, too.  I like that it’s a pop of color, and if I decide not to like it, we still have the old shade.  I could even cut off the fabric and use it for something else, but I’m hoping it will grow on me.

What do you think?  Did you join up in the Pinterest challenge?

Make sure you stop over to the fab four challenge leaders this time around: Katie, Sherry and John, Ana, and Erin.