Burlap Lamp Shade

Today's post comes from another Pinterest idea that you can find here. I have hated these lamp shades (we have 2) since we moved into our house about 7 years ago. In fact, I really am not a fan of lamps to begin with, but because we do not have a light in our living room, we have to live off of these lamps. 

I started a few years ago (before Pinterest) looking for a way to update these old lamps and lampshades. I first heard of taking brown paper bags and covering lampshades to make them look like leather. But, we don't have a lot of paper bags and the ones we do have have logos on them. The other day, okay, maybe it was about a month ago, I saw an idea to cover a lampshade with burlap. I love burlap and thought this might actually work for us. I basically followed the directions form this website, but I hit a couple of snags as you will see. Here's how I did it: 

Boring old lampshade. The other one looks just like this. I ripped off the cover which, thankfully, was really easy to do.

I rolled the lampshade on the burlap drawing a line with permanent marker as I went. I wanted to make sure I had plenty of fabric so I added about 2 inches from the top and bottom of the lampshade.

I'm making two so after cutting out the first piece, I just traced the second and cut it out. 

Use spray adhesive to attach the burlap to the lampshade. This took me a few tries because I couldn't get the burlap to lay flat on the lampshade. I started by spraying the entire shade and then rolling the shade over the burlap, but that did not work. Then I sprayed just a line or two while wrapping the burlap around the lampshade. This worked okay, but I still had to smooth out the burlap a bit after it was attached. Luckily, the adhesive stayed tacky enough for me to adjust the fabric a bit. 

Next, you will want to cut the extra burlap from the top, bottom, and the seam that runs up and down the shade. For the seam, I wanted a little overlap. You can make yours as you wish.

Then I cut a strip for the top and the bottom of each lampshade about twice the width that I wanted the edging to be. I used Heat n Bond like the original post suggests. I have never used it before so maybe it worked like it was supposed to, but I was under the impression that it should have bonded together. Mine did not.

I followed the directions from the Heat n Bond package to try to bond together the folded edges of the strip. As you can see, it did not work as I had hoped. Even so, I continued on and hot glued the edging to the lampshade.

In the original post, she suggests that you use clothes pins to help secure the edging. I started doing that, but when I took the clothespins off, I was left with little indentations where the clothespins were. I stopped using them and just guided the edging where I wanted it. It stayed just fine for me without the clothespins. Cut the excess edging off and secure the edge with some hot glue.

Almost done! See the little pieces of burlap sticking up? I trimmed those down and...

Wallah! Okay, so can you see the indents at the top on the edging. That is from the clothespins. But it works for us and looks pretty good I think.

If I was going to do this again, I would iron the fabric. (Duh! Obviously a non-experienced worker with fabric here.) I would work on a table not the floor. Especially because I didn't vacuum first and ended up with dog hair on my burlap lampshades. I would not use clothespins. And I would find a better way to do the edging since the Heat n Bond didn't work they way I wanted it to and I just had to hold the fold as I hot glued.

Something I learned that most of you probably already knew but I thought it was cool and DIDN'T know: An easy way to cut burlap.

All you have to do is pull out the thread on the line that you want to cut and you have an easy marker to follow.

See? Pretty cool.