$1 million lamp for $20

I flatter myself that someone would pay $1 million for this little beauty, but $1 million is exactly what it would take for me to part with it!  Days and days of blood, sweat, and tears went into the making of this lamp!  Ok, none of those bodily dramatizations were involved in the actual construction of said lighting implement, but suffice it to say, this DIY project is a commitment. But, I get ahead of myself.

I live in an apartment… a can’t-paint, blue-countertops, particle-board-doors apartment.  A few weeks ago Megan came to my rescue to help me cutify it for cheap.  Dirt cheap.  I like to think of us as imprisoned artists working with the limited medium in our cell.  ANYHOW, Megan found these awesome lamps at Deseret Industries for like $11 a piece.

A can of spray paint for $5 (prime heavily… really heavily)

A few yards of fabric $4,

Enough glue sticks to stretch to Mars and back (when laid end to end of course, which, by-the-way, are technically free in the craft accounting world because I already had them),

About 30 hours of girlie movies (give or take a Doris Day), and…

VOILA!  The darn cutest lamps you’ve ever seen.  We call Megan’s the “buttercream lamp” because it reminds us of real frosting on an expensive wedding cake.

(The cute wall up there, you should know, is Megan’s wall… I aspire to have a wall of my own some day.)

To make these adorable accents, choose the absolute largest drum lamp shades you can find at a thrift store (just kidding, we didn’t know what we were getting into, it takes a really long time to cover a large shade.)  Cut your fabric into squares about 1 or 2 inches wide.  Wrap the square over the end of a pencil and hot glue it to the lamp shade, much like the way you made a crepe paper pinata in elementary school.  Continue to glue squares of fabric scrunched in next to each other so they fluff up nicely.

These really are adorable AND depending on what style of fabric you use the possibilities are endless… ENDLESS (as are the hours of Pride and Prejudice you can absorb while gluing).

I’d like to thank Megan; because of her my apartment is a wee bit homier.