DIY (Ikea) Tulle Lampshade....

 

I saw this super-cute lamp in my Ikea catalog. I really wanted it. It was such a neat looking lamp. Then I saw the price tag. $99.00. Dang. I don't think I've ever paid more than $10 for a lamp. It was a good thought.

 

 

Then I had an even better idea. I found a couple lamp shades at the last DownEast  sale. I took all the paper off of it and grabbed the tulle I had in my craft stash.

 

I began by cutting the tulle into 2-ft pieces. I cut the tulle so that it was enough to tie around the top with excess and to tie/glue at the bottom of the lamp shade with excess as well.

Once the pieces were cut, I combined four pieces together and then tied them at the top of the lamp- four to each "side" and then a group of eight pieces of tulle around each of the wires going down the side.

 As you can see- I have quite a bit of excess tulle. With one end of the tulle tied at the top, I let the rest flow down, in preparation for gluing to the lamp shade form.

 

 I tied the corner tulle (covering the additional form wires)  to keep it out of the way- it's purple mainly to differentiate the parts.

I pulled the tulle in sections (there were four- one for each side of the form) one-at-a-time through the center of the lamp shade form. I hot glued the INSIDE of the form first and laid the tulle flat against it- as neatly as possible. When that cooled I glued the OTHER side of the form and pulled/wrapped the tulle around that. This allowed the tulle to flare out to the sides of the lamp shade.

After I glued it all, I trimmed the bottom tulle so that it was approx. 3 inches long.

Here's the lamp with a trimmed bottom and untrimmed top/

Then I cropped the top. I cut the tulle down to match the length of the bottom.

Using the extra tulle that I had been trimming off I started to add more "poof" to the bottom half of the lamp.

I gathered approximately four-ish small pieces together. I folded them down, glued down the center (folded again, so the pieces were all glued together) and then glued this filler piece to the underside of the lamp.

It looked like this:

 I just repeated what I had done with the first tulle - just smaller 'chunks'.

After I added what I wanted I turned it over and trimmed it down {again}.

I really am pleased with the way it turned out. I must say that I really thought this was going to be a craft FAIL. So, my total for this lovely little lamp? Tulle: $7.00, Lamp: $3.50, Lamp Shade $1.50. Total {ish} $12.00! Far cry from $99.00- so I'm pretty happy about it.

Check out the AMAZING spray paint tutorials submitted this week over at MMMblog!