Lampshade

I finished re-covering an old lampshade, after a great deal of fiddling.

It sat for a long time, while I thought about a lining for it. I was going to use large sheets of watercolor paper, but they were too inflexible and difficult to fit to the lampshade’s slightly tapered shape. Finally I resorted to Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts:  The Art and Science of Keeping House* for ideas on materials. She mentioned parchment, which made me think of kitchen parchment paper...but it was too fragile. I also experimented with freezer paper a bit, but soon got tired of wrestling with it and decided to just use fabric.

I had the outer fabric picked out already. After many false starts, it became clear that the best way to proceed for both the inner and outer fabrics was to machine sew them into tubes, hemmed at the lower edge, and hand sew that end to the frame. Then I could trim the top edge neatly, and sew that down, gathering or tucking as needed, since the top of the frame is narrower than the bottom.

I did all that for the lining first, since it made sense to work from the inside out. At the top, I gathered it to fit. For the outer fabric, tucks looked better.

Where I needed to sew them together, I used the “Frankenstein stitch”/antique seam mentioned in this post.

I was careful at all stages to keep the edges very neat, and to remove all stray threads and lint from the fabrics, because as Mendelson warns in her book, when you turn on the light, you can see everything that’s in the lampshade.

Still, I could have done better with that; out of the four sides, only one came out as the “good” side. But one is enough, and there is always the possibility of adding some opaque trim.

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* A book which is a good reference, but exhausting to read, unless you replace every instance of “should” in it with”could”. The claim in the beginning that she is describing ideal housekeeping, and not prescribing it, are insufficient against the bulk and sense of the text.