Lampshades

Featured Pro: Carter Oosterhouse
Category: Home Decor
Time: 4:17


CARTER OOSTERHOUSE: The look of your lampshades can really improve the overall décor of your home. But most lampshades are pretty plain. So I just picked up some materials and I’m going to show you how to take a plain lampshade and give it new life.

I’m Carter Oosterhouse, and this is your GMC Trade Secret.

Now, various lamps can give you various styles, but the lampshades themselves can be pretty basic. Here you can see this lampshade is a nice oval shape. And what I did to give it a little bit more style was I put this lace right around the top of it. Of course, it’s matching color as the base on the bottom.

Now, this lamp is a little bit more contemporary. Of course, it has a basic white lampshade. But I’m going to dress it up to give it a little bit more style. Now, what I’m going to do is just take this ribbon, and I have some metal flowers right here, and I’m going to glue them all around the lampshade to make it look a whole lot better.

All right. So now that the lampshade is wrapped with the brown ribbon, I’ve just made this little decorative bow to add a little more style to it. I’ll just take my glue gun, put a little hot glue on there, and place this right on – hold that on for a second; make sure it’s nice and secure. Look at that.

I’m going to take these metal flowers. And I just bought them at a little craft store down the road. They’re very inexpensive. But again, they’re just going to add a bit more beauty to this lampshade. And I’m going to simply glue the back side of them and then stick them on.

All right. Now we have basically taken a simple contemporary lamp and lampshade and gave it a whole lot more style.

Let’s try another one. All right, again, we have another off-white lampshade. And what I’m doing now is simply adding this decorative bead right on the fringe. So what I’ve been doing is using the glue gun, just adding a little glue; really simple. You go about six to eight inches, just so the glue doesn’t dry. Simply place it right on the fringe.

Now, most lampshades will have a seam. So it’s smart to start and end right on the seam, so that way you can tuck it on the back side of the lamp. All right. So now you can see we’ve taken a traditional lamp with a traditional lampshade and added this bead around the bottom fringe. And it’s really cool, because it adds another color, another texture. And these orange beads catch the light really well. That’s a great lamp.

Now, this last one, you can see what I’ve done here is I’ve started with this applique, which again goes on really easy. Again, obviously it’s a black lampshade, so this white is going to pop right when I put it on. And it’s just personal opinion of how much you want to put on, where you want to put it on. And the back side of these appliques are usually so sticky that they go on really fast and they stay on pretty tight.

All right. So this design took a little bit longer than anticipated, but sometimes with these appliques you just have to play around until you find what works. I think that works pretty good.

Now have fun transforming your old lampshades into something new. Just give it a little design. But make sure you give it your own personal touch.

I’m Carter Oosterhouse, and this is your GMC Trade Secret.