DIY Lamp shade

I was in a shady contest… As in a lamp shade contest, ha! And I’m back today with the DIY lampshade tutorial.

Let’s start with the inspiration shade from Pomp and Circumstance. It’s awesome and made out of balsa wood.   Of  course, I wanted to make the shade my own, and I’ve been really into mixed woods lately. I made a jewelry organizer out of leftover floor samples last year and decided to go for the same multi wood shade look with the lamp shade.

For the contest, lamps.com gave each of us this free shade for the contest:

Here’s what you need to make a DIY lampshade

• 7 strips of as wide and thin balsa wood that you can find  (I got mine from Hobby Lobby. 7 strips cost me $17)
• brown acrylic paint and water
• bowl
• scissors
• hot glue gun

First, I painted my strips of balsa wood with acrylic paint. I painted a few strips a darker color, then watered down the paint, and painted a few more strips, etc…

Here are my painted and dried balsa wood strips ready to be cut.

I used scissors to cut each wide strip into multiple pieces. This saved money! I made my strips all different sizes. The thin balsa wood can easily be cut with scissors!

Now it’s time for assembly. Be patient, it will get frustrating. First, hot glue one piece of wood around the top and bottom of the shade. If you have a large shade, like me, one piece will not fit… cut up another one and  do a little patch, like so…

I only glued the edges of the balsa wood down. You need to be able to tuck the ends into each other. Also, only the first few strips can be put on all in one piece. After that I started cutting the strips to fit specific spots and go under/ over certain pieces. I tried to keep the pieces as tight to the shade as possible.

The weaving process takes time and patience! My mom helped me a lot… I was getting frustrated! Many of the pieces in the pic below are only a few inches long. It’s not going to be perfect… it has issues… and that yellow wall was not helping the color in this picture either : /

Here she is full view, and you can’t really see the issues. I’m love her. She’s pretty. I’m hoping one day she might be a pendant light! We’ll see…

Once upon a time I was in another lamp contest… this was to win the ugly lamp award, ha! I also recently did a lamp makeover with paint and water and gave it a giant yellow shade. Anyhow, what do you think about my balsa wood beauty queen? I smitten with my new shade, and I hope you are too. Oh and if you liked this lampshade makeover, check out 22 more really awesome lampshade makeover ideas!