Lamp Revived

In the same thrift shop I got my picture frames, I ended up buying an old lamp and lampshade.  They weren't looking too good, but for $10 total, I thought I could make something happen.  Here's the before.

I really liked the shape of the base and could see it being so nice bright and white.  And all the shade needed was a little brightening up.  I chose this fun flowery fabric for it.

I believe it is from Waverly's Sun 'n' Shade.  Isn't it just so happy?

The first thing I did was tear off the old fabric from the shade.  This involved slight gagging as dust and dried paint particles flew.

The next thing I did was spray paint the base white.  It was no simple task.  Well, maybe it was simple, but it took forever!  The first 5 coats seemed like they were hardly covering anything!  Good thing it was hot and dry outside so things dried quickly, allowing me to do coats within minutes of each other (I had about 10 things I was spray painting, so I just went around in circles and once I got to the beginning, things were ready for a second coat).  I forgot to take an after picture of just the base, so you'll have to get to the bottom of the post before you can see it.  The only bad thing was I think some dirt was  flying around in the air and got stuck on the lamp base because there are little bumps on certain places.  I could try sanding it down, but so far it really hasn't bothered me.

Ok, next step was to cover the shade with my new fabric.  I laid out the old covering on top of my new fabric (and also rolled the lamp shade across the new fabric since the old covering was stretched a bit when it was on the shade) to make sure I cute out enough fabric to cover the shade completely.  It was a little tricky because the shade wasn't perfectly cylindrical, so I just cut it extra wide.  This is what I ended up with.

I took the fabric outside and used some of Elmer's craft bond to get the fabric to stick.  I did the outside first, then trimmed down the fabric and glued a small bit of fabric over the edge.

Next up all I had to do was put the lamp together and plug it in.  Here are a few pictures of it against the paint color in the office (the rest of the room was a mess at the time, so I don't have a picture of it in its final resting place).

I put the ball of string in so you'd have an idea of the size of the lamp.  It's pretty tall!

Look at those hyperbolas being cast on the wall!