Fabric Rosette Lampshade

My latest project almost had it in for me. And my kitchen table.

When I started this project I naively thought that I'd simply whip up a few flowers, glue them to the shade and ta-da!!! a gorgeous and effortless new lampshade.
Gorgeous...Yes.
Effortless?...Not so much.
But we'll save the drama for later.

Sooooo, a while back I refurbished a couple of ebay lamps.
I ended up in love with one of them and it's now on my nightstand, but the other one needed some improvements.

For starters, it was boring. And the white shade clashing with the creamy spray paint bugged me. It's like when my hubby wears black dress shoes with navy or brown socks. I start twitching.

So I decided to change everything.

I bought three yards of white muslin and a new box of 24 glue sticks for my glue gun and got to work.

This is how my table looked for days...

And days...

And days...
My table became a barren wasteland of ripped muslin and dried glue strings everywhere.

You see, genius that I am decided to cover the entire shade with the rosettes. Not just a small part of it. So after many days of twirling and blistered fingers I had this:

Not very promising. But I stuck it out. For two weeks.

The problem was, after twirling a dozen or so rosettes, my fingers would cramp and start to look like the hands of an 85-year old, so I could only do so many a day.

But I had seen a shade covered in white fabric rosettes at Homegoods and I was determined to copy it, no matter how blistered and distorted my hands became. So I hung in there for another week (yes, it took me THREE WEEKS to finish what should have been an easy project) and FINALLY finished what will now be known as 'the devil's lampshade.'

I decided to spray paint the lamp a pretty aqua. I think it will be darling in the girls' room someday when they have their own room.

I ended up using all three yards of muslin and almost the entire box of glue sticks for this one project. But I actually think it was worth it. I love the end result!

I'm still not completely happy with this combination of lamp and shade. I just won a few beautiful milk glass lamps off of ebay so I'm sure I'll find a good match among them. Once my fingers heal, of course.

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