Refashioned Classical Lampshade

Hi everyone, I'm back with my latest upcycling project, a lampshade this time!

Here is the story behind it. 

A long time ago, someone gave my grandparents a stone vase. It was very pretty but also very heavy and instead of just using it for decoration my grandfather transformed it into a lamp. With a twist. He not only added a light bulb on top, but also one inside the vase, which creates a beautiful effect when lit. 

When my husband and I got married (eleven years ago next month) my mother gave us the lamp. We bought a side table specifically for it and it sat happily in our living room for several years. Then we had a baby boy and when said boy started moving around I decided it was safer to store the lamp somewhere else, as it was a very heavy and potentially unstable object. Then our daughter was born and we re-started the whole process. All in all, the poor lamp lived inside a closet for the past seven years. 

This summer, when we finished repainting the living room, I finally decided to bring it out again. But the original lampshade was in a bad condition. This is what it looked like before: 

The photo, however, doesn't begin to show the extent of the damage. The white fabric was yellowed in places and the once golden trim had turned a wrinkled shade of brown, a combination of 60+ years of age and seven years of storage. 

At first I thought about buying a new lampshade, but when I couldn't find in stores one that matched either the size or the style of the original one, I started toying with the idea of upcycling it. 

I went through my stash of fabrics and found a creamy white one and some bits and pieces of the soft orange fabric of our living room curtains. Score! I could "make" a new lampshade perfectly matching the living room decor at zero cost!

So, one morning after school stared, I ripped the old fabric from the structure of the lampshade and dedicated myself to patiently creating neat pleats with the white fabric (I didn't take pictures of the process, but each pleat is sewn onto the structure top and bottom). 

Then I cut two long strips of the darker fabric (the one leftover from the living room curtains), folded them bias-tape like and glued them over the edges of the lampshade. This creates a neat contrast and hides the stitches securing the pleats. 

I love the end result. It looks classical and elegant, but doesn't draw your attention from the beauty of the stone vase, and complements our living room perfectly. 

Have a wonderful week,