How to Cover A Lamp Shade with Fabric

Hello again friends. I hope you are having a good week so far. Today I am going to show you how to take a plain lamp shade and cover it with fabric to jazz it up.

Here was my lamp before. It’s a simple lamp with a super simple shade.

Nothing extraordinary going on here so I wanted give it a little life but I didn’t want to buy a new shade for it since this one was in excellent condition.

What’s a girl to do? Find some extra fabric I had lying around the house and cover my existing lamp shade with it. (HINT: I used a thinner fabric for this project. It was just easier to work with than a thicker indoor/outdoor kind of fabric)

First you want cut your fabric. Lay you fabric out on a flat space then lay your lamp shade over the fabric so that you know how much you need to cut. I cut the fabric so that there was and inch overlap at the top and bottom. Also if you notice my shade is thinner at the top than the bottom. So what you want to do is cute the fabric in a crest shape so that it fits a little better. (if you don’t get the crest shape cut right it’s ok, you can cut the excess fabric off later)

Now we are ready you attach the fabric to the shade. There are a few ways to do this but I chose to use a hot glue gun since that’s what I had on hand. I made a glue line along the shade seam and attached one side of the fabric. I pressed down over the fabric to smooth it out.

Now for the other end, I folded the rough seam over to make a nice clean edge and glued that in place. I then glued that nice seam over the edge that is already glued to the shade. Make sure the fabric is nice and taught and then glue it down over the seam. 

So now we are ready to deal with the edges. First I cut the excess fabric down to about a 1/4″. Just cut around the perimeter so you are left with this.

Then I tucked those edges under and glued them on the inside of the shade. This males a nice clean line.

That’s it! This took me maybe 10 minutes and I completely changed the look of this lamp with things I had already lying around my house.  If you don’t have these things lying around your house, you can always get scrap fabric at your local fabric store for a discounted price and you can always find lamps and shades at Goodwill, thrift stores and yard sales for a great price. Don’t forget you can always paint the lamp base if you don’t like too like I did here.