Our Lamp’s Got Flair
Do we want to have the kind of lamps that wear the minimum amount of flair? Heck no! That’s exactly why we’re jazzin’ this piece up.
Our groovy red $30 lamp from Carolina Pottery came with an equally affordable – and therefore basic white lamp shade. We’ve been staring at that corner for a few months now, still loving the lamp – you’ll remember we weren’t so sure at first if you read this post from way back when – but wanting to mix things up.
So we ran out to Michael’s craft store and picked up some cheapo red ribbon for around $3 a spool.
Since it would have been a bit cumbersome, and let’s say it – strange, to drag our lamp into Michael’s to get a ribbon that matched exactly, we chose to bring a couple of options home. We’ll just take the extra back – yes we’re tight wads who will return a $3 spool of ribbon.
We opted for ribbon #1, the grosgrain (pronounced “grow grain” not “gross grain”) without the white stitches. Those stitches were cute but a bit too traditional for our curvy, modern lamp body. Plus the red wasn’t perfect and I’m weird enough to be bothered by that.
After choosing a ribbon we just warmed up the ‘ol hot glue gun and glued the ribbon to the bottom rim of the lamp shade, leaving the thin white border that was already in place to maintain a little bit of contrast between the red lamp and red ribbon.
If you are trying this at home, just make sure to line up your ribbon seam with the seam in your shade. We actually didn’t think of this right away and had to pull some of the glued ribbon up and start over. You can see some dry glue residue in the picture above – great to know that if we every decide that we don’t like this ribbon any more we can easily pull it back off and the glue too. Live and learn right?
The finished product is a subtle change, but one that just adds a bit of dimension and layering to a boring old lamp shade. Doing this over time will keep the room visually interesting and fresh for us.
Here’s the before again.
And a close up, you can see the glue line a bit in the picture with the lamp on, but in person it is not prominent at all.
Simple changes can make a nice impact to a room huh? We’re loving how easy this was and we were really surprised with how much we like the final look.
We’re off to return some red ribbon and fight the urge to hot glue all of our other lamp shades – we’re not the minimum-flair type. What about you guys?
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