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If you’re looking for a flawless, professionally made lamp shade, you may not like this idea because that’s not how we operate. This is very “handmade,” it’s primitive on purpose and pretty cool. We like stuff like this although we do tend to get bored quickly and redo it later. I guess the point is, it’s fun to just do without being perfect.
Yep, here we go again with the dam chicken wire aka hardware cloth! We should mention it’s not a fine mesh, it’s the hardware cloth with the great big openings….I’m sure there’s a word for that.
We made the lamp shade from scratch so we had to “wing it” and make it up as we went along. The good thing is, you can make it any size you want and you won’t have to stick to the size of the hoop, because we didn’t use one.
Using wire cutters, we cut out enough hardware cloth to make a tall, narrow lamp shade, a size and shape we’ve never seen in a store. Then we wired the ends together to make a big cylinder shape.
We put in two heavy wires that cross in the middle of the shade with a hole for the threaded stud of the harp (see photo/diagram below).
To cover the hardware cloth, we used pages from a used book by cutting them in strips narrow enough to go in between the chicken wire either vertically or horizontally. We randomly alternated vertical with horizontal.
We folded the ends of the paper over the wire and glued with a glue stick. In some places we just glued the paper flat to paper already glued to the lamp shade.
One of the books we used was about positive thinking so we saved “positive messages” and kept them intact and glued them throughout the shade. We found the book in a clearance bin so it was dirt cheap. Check out the photos below!
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i love the lamp……….