How to Make a Floor Lamp Shade

I thought I should show you how to make a floor lamp shade because this is something that is relatively simple to do. The shade on a lamp is quite important. It creates the proper ambient feeling for a room and doesn't allow things to get too bright. When you create your own, it gives you the leeway to choose exactly what you want to see as a design and create a feeling that you think will best fit for this room. That is why you can get with the right lamp shade and I'm going to show you how to do this.

Find a Basic Lamp Shade

The issue here isn't that you find something good. Just find something that holds the shape of what you're looking for. You can grab one from around the house or you can go buy a cheap one somewhere. It doesn't matter. The idea here for having one is so that we can mimic it in every way and get the proper size we're going to need.

At this point you're going to have your material that you want to make the actual shade out of. This is really up to you and what you want for the room. I'm not going to suggest anything. You have to get the right amount of fabric to make the actual shade. What you do is use the floor lamp shade that you have now and trace an outline on the fabric. You do this by putting the shade on it side and roll it across the fabric. It's really the only way that you can get an accurate size.

At this point you're going to want to start cutting out the fabric block that you traced in. You're going to want to leave around 1 inch on each end. This is just for overlap and it can be shortened later while you're in the design stage.

Now you're going to want to evenly apply spray glue to the back of the fabric. And you're going to want to roll the current lampshade onto the fabric. This has to be done carefully and evenly or it just isn't going to look right. You just do this by keeping the adhesive side up on a table and roll the lamp shade onto it. Make sure that you're pressing firmly on the fabric to make sure that it is sticking. You'll also want to make sure you get all pockets of air and any sort of wrinkles.

Once you make it all the way around, you want to make sure the end of the fabric is folded in. I aim for about half an inch and than I glue it over the starting part of the fabric. You'll want to hold the end in for a few minutes, just to make sure that it is sticking good. In fact you want to make sure the entire floor lamp shade is properly holding together and there is no problems with it.

At this point you're going to experience overhanging of fabric on the top and bottom areas of the shade. Just take some more of that spray glue go around the outside with it on the top and bottom. Once you do that all you have to do is fold the fabric around the rim. Makes sure that you hold it in place, so that it properly seals.

At this point you're pretty much done. You'll have the design of a shade that you really like the look of, but you may want to add some more to it. I can't really say what you'd like. People like to put trim on it, which can be very simple or you could have beads coming down. Whatever your taste is, is what you should be using. Remember that the spray glue won't work that well for trim. You should probably use a glue gun.