How to fix a lampshade ... ...

Like a lot of people we have a large lamp in the front room, and up until recently all was well with said lamp (which reminds me, must get round to making that 'Beware ! low flying toys' sign)

Whilst the lamp itself is fine it appears the shade bore the brunt of the impact, so I figured well, might as well see if I can't do something with it, rater than bin it.


The shade -

Missing some important bits.

It dawned on me that making a way for the shade to fit onto the lamp wasn't going to be that much of a problem, I had already tried to weld the bits back on, but failed, but figured something else might work.

So I took a slightly different route, using a bit of hardboard, now I should point out that the lamp uses one of those energy saving bulbs, and as such it doesn't get very warm, I could get away with a bigger wattage bulb, but it would make things too bright, and perhaps a bit too warm, I'd rather not start a fire if I can possibly avoid it.

So here's what I did, firstly I marked out a square of hardboard, and then put the shade on it, then drew round the outside of the shade, the idea being that the hardboard would then be a bit bigger than the inside of the shade, and would make a nice tight fit.

Firstly I removed the remaining bits - 

Blank canvass, so to speak.

 

Then I marked out a square onto my hardboard and found the centre, then I put the shade onto the hardboard, getting it as near to the centre as possible.

All marked up - 

Onto the next phase.

Now at this point you may be thinking "You've made a mistake" how are you going to fit that onto the lamp ? the answer is simple, I cut out a hole roughly the size of the fixing on the lamp (I used the old fixing to work out the size) then using one of my many hole saws I cut out a hole in the centre of the hardboard.

Fixing hole cut - 

It's a bit bigger to allow for aligning.

The next job was to cut out the circle I had marked out on the board, but then I thought it might be a little boring, so I decided to try a little experiment.

I drew stars on the board - 

Might have over done it a tad.

I used a transfer type method to get the stars onto the board, I basically printed out some star shapes of varying sizes onto a bit of paper, then went over the outlines in pencil, turned the paper over and using the pencil I transferred the star shapes onto the board, by scribbling over each shape.

Stars being outlined - 

I used LibreOffice Draw (like OpenOffice Draw) for the shapes.

The next bit took what seemed like ages to do, but I cut out each star shape on my scroll saw, I was sick of cutting out the shapes after a while, not really, any excuse to mess about with power tools.

Stars all cut out and fitted to the shade - 

Catman approves.

You can see how the new part fits into the shade, it basically rests under the rim of the shade, which was the reason for making the new part slightly larger than it needed to be.

View from inside the shade - 

And it's done, saved having to buy a new one.

And here's what it looks like when the light is on - 

I quite like it.

Now, had this lamp been an up lighter it would project stars in light on the ceiling, but it's not, although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't now thinking of a way to turn it into an up lighter.

Here's what happens when you shine a light upwards - 

Pretty cool I think.

As it happens the lamp does actually project the stars when I use different bulbs, so now I'm wondering whether to make another shade that has bats or spider webs on it especially for Halloween.

Thanks for reading.