So, my room is lit by these rather blah-looking lamps - wooden bases and cream colored shades. Oops! I forgot to take a picture before I dissected the lamps for this project. I decided they needed something different. I love gold - and patterns. I had something like this in mind.
First things first - I spray painted the bases white. It's so hard to get the spray paint even! Hold the can a good distance from the object you are spraying and layer the paint on in thin coats. DON'T sand first - I thought this would help the paint stick better, but it just scratched it. Maybe it would work better if I had done a more thorough job!
This website had the nifty idea to tape a plastic bag inside the lampshade while spray painting. It did take a lot of coats of paint, but the shade looked at least a little bit whiter when I'd finished.
Shade #1 was getting a herringbone pattern. This website has a lot of good tips on how to trace the pattern, although I didn't follow it exactly. I just measured to make sure the vertical marks/lines were even, and eyeballed the slanted lines. I was going for a slightly irregular hand-painted look.
I used gold fabric paint - I had a hard time choosing between that and another gold paint. I wasn't extremely happy with either option - I wanted something really sparkly and glossy. I am going to look for something different while I am home in the States and repaint the shades when I go back to South Africa.
It was a time-consuming process!
Lampshade #2 got gold polka dots. I followed the tutorial on this website, only using a sponge to make the dots didn't work for me (probably because I tried to cut a kitchen sponge into a circle in the absence of an actual sponge stamper). I traced something circular and carefully filled in the dots with a paintbrush.
This is the end result! I didn't remember to get a good picture before I left, but you can see the general idea.
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