Saturday, August 20, 2011

Wrap, wrap, wrap... wrap it up

It has been a fairly productive day here in the crazy house.  Poor Sake had waaaay too much energy this morning (note to my fairy godmother: we need to fence the yard), so we started our activities at the area dog park.  Thank goodness for this place, because otherwise puppy would only get to really run when Daddy is home - he rides his 10 speed full out so she can stretch her legs.
Look at this place...
Outagamie County Dog Park - North Park
This is just one of three areas that the dogs can run, play and socialize in during the warm weather.  Gorgeous!  When snow arrives, we’ll check out the fourth and final unknown... the winter-specific area.  Really, it’s awesome, so if you’re local check it out, and if you’re an animal lover who just happens to be rolling in cash, they survive on donations, no additional funding at all.  Just sayin’  ;)
After the doggy exercise, we went shopping!  Actual retail shopping, and I found both the perfect wedding gift and a toy for myself that I suspect will factor heavily in some later posts.  Yay!  I’m just a little excited :)
Why is it that even when the kids are behaving, having all three of them with me in a store is so freakin’ stressful?!?  A big Thank You! to my mom, who kept them at her place when it turned out that the only location to still have one of the “Perfect Wedding Gift” was at the mall.  I WILL NOT take my children to the mall.  God help me when they’re teenagers...  We got lunch from a mission-supporting, fund-raising brat fry, and went home to get the girls down for the naps that I they so desperately needed. 
Ah, naptime.  The delicious quiet, the potential to get grown-up things done...  yeah, I fell asleep.  Only for a couple of minutes, though, I promise!  When I jerked awake on the couch, I had only one thing on my mind, and it was this:

What the...???       Exhibit #1
(backstory)  Months ago, I picked up this lamp from Goodwill.  

It keeps reverting to its side!  Sorry!
It will be the perfect reading light, and it’s very sturdy.  All it needed was a nice shade, right?  Uh huh.  Problem:  the shade fitting was threaded.  I’m a small-town girl; I had no idea that such things existed.  Thank goodness for Google, which taught me about UNO fittings for lampshades, blah, blah, blah.



Basically, this little treasure needed a special type of shade that did NOT fit into the crazy house budget.  Enter Ebay, and an UNO lampshade frame for $11 (see exhibit #1).  I was tickled, and had all kinds of good ideas about how I could make it really cool.  
Did I mention that this was all months ago?
Yesterday, during a cleaning fit (don’t worry, I’ve recovered nicely), I found my big spool of jute.  I knew I had one, but it’s been misplaced for some time (months, maybe?).   Anyway, I woke from my nap, saw that pathetic frame hanging from the lamp that had never even been plugged in, and remembered the jute.  In the last minutes of blissful stillness, I got to work.  


I also found a marathon of Gilmore Girls on the SOAP channel, so that was a win-win.  I still want to be Lorelei.

The procedure is simple - tie a square knot to whatever inside joint is available, and walk the jute over to the first of the six wires that make up the frames panels.  



Wrap the jute over and around the first wire, under and around the second, over and around the third, etc. until you get to the sixth, where you have to go against the pattern and go OVER, in order to get the lovely woven effect for most of the panels. 

If the frame you want to use has an odd number of wires, there’s no need or reason to deviate from the over, under pattern.  With an even number, you’re going to end up with 5 “woven” panels and one with nice, straight lines.  It’s a subtle difference, and unless you’re looking closely at the shade, it’s not going to be noticeable.  I turned my “odd” panel to the wall, as I’m one of those freaks of nature who would notice, and be bothered by it daily.

To finish the bottom edge, I simply chose to wrap the thicker wire with the jute I had left.  The difficult part about that was getting the unwinding spool between the wire, and the wrapping I had already completed.  My solution was to push the wrapped material as far toward the top as possible, which looked horrible and scared me that I had ruined the whole thing.  After each section's bottom frame was complete, I adjusted the upper sections back into place to reassure myself that things were ok.  They always were.  Whew!
There you have it!  A hand-worked lampshade for cheap - the lamp, shade and jute all together were less than $20.  I love the texture it'll bring to the room (which room?  I can't decide yet).  AND I got some bonding time in with all my peeps in Stars Hollow!  


It was a good day, my friends!  Hope it was wonderful for y'all as well...



xoxo,
Tami
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is a very cool lamp. I love how you used jute twine on it.

Piper said...

OMG, I just passed over a lamp just like this at Goodwill today for $5.99 because I couldnt figure out what kind of lampshade would go on it! It had the threads and everything. I'm gonna just have to go back now and get it!

Thank you for the tutorial!!!!