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Lighting is the most important component of the interior. The coziness and comfort level of our home depends on the lighting. The play of light and shadow allows you to beat the winning moments of the interior and divert attention from bad moments. And also – lamps, floor lamps, chandeliers and lamps create the atmosphere that we call “home”. Unique lamps will help to make the home only “your own”, personal, individual, and the best way is to make a lampshade with your own hands. Homemade ceiling lamps and lampshades are the thing that will make your home stand out from the rest.
A few words about security
In the manufacture of lamps, floor lamps and chandeliers in industrial conditions, the minimum distance from the “body” of the lamp to the materials is preliminarily calculated. This distance depends on the power and thermal radiation of the lamp and on the type (combustibility) of the material from which the ceiling / lampshade is made. At home, hardly anyone will bother with such calculations. And in order not to create a dangerous situation, it is worth adhering to certain rules.
- Use low wattage light bulbs that don’t generate a lot of heat. There are two options – “housekeeper” and LED. When choosing LED lamps, you will have to buy expensive ones, as you need lamps with good heatsinks – metal and ceramic, which dissipate heat. These are far from cheap. The consolation is that they emit even light and have a very long service life (in theory, several decades).
Before making a lampshade with your own hands, think about safety - If possible, use ceramic rather than plastic cartridges. They dissipate heat better.
- Do not place flammable materials (paper, cardboard, cotton and synthetic fabric) closer than 5-7 cm to the lamp.
And in general, having made a lampshade and installing it, in the first few days, pay attention to whether the ceiling heats up. Heating is any increase in temperature above ambient. If the lampshade feels “warm”, change the light bulb to a less powerful one. Check again. So until the homemade lampshade warms up.
Where to get a frame
If you want to remake an old lamp, floor lamp, sconces in which the old lampshade has become unusable, you can simply use the existing base by peeling off the old material. Before starting work, inspect the frame well, if there is rust or a damaged coating somewhere, maybe it’s worth stripping everything off and painting it again? At the same time, the color can be changed. If there are no old frames, you can buy an inexpensive lamp (in a store or at a flea market) and do the same operations with it. Good lampshades can, by the way, be made from waste baskets. They are wire, there are plastic. The main thing is to find a suitable shape and size. Then make a hole in the bottom for the cartridge. Further – it’s up to the decoration / plating, and here there are a lot of options.
If this method is also not available, you can make a lampshade without a frame (there are some) or make a frame yourself. The material for making a frame for a lampshade with your own hands is: wire, wood (wooden or bamboo sticks, specially cut elements), plastic bottles.
How to make a frame for a homemade wire lampshade
The wire for the lamp frame needs aluminum or steel. Aluminum is easy to work with, but wrinkle easily. This is not very important when the lampshade is already in use, but this fact must be taken into account during operation: you can ruin the shape. On the other hand, such plasticity allows easy and simple changes in the shape during operation. So that’s a good option. Aluminum wire can be “mined” from electrical cables. You will have to remove the protective shell and you can use it.
Steel wire is more elastic, so it retains its shape well. It can be found in the construction market. It’s harder to work with her. It is desirable that there were strong male hands nearby.
In addition to the wire, you will need powerful wire cutters and pliers to work. The frame of the lampshade usually consists of two rings and racks connecting them. The shape of the future lampshade depends on the size of the rings and the shape of the racks. Questions may arise regarding the number of racks and how they are attached. The number of posts depends on the size of the rings and how “round” you want the lampshade to be. The more posts, the more “smoothly” the fabric will lie. So it’s up to you to choose, but the optimal distance between the racks in the lower circle is about 5-6 cm.
Methods for attaching the stack to the lampshade rings depend on the thickness and type of wire, as well as the tools you have. The easiest is to make a small hook at the end, then clamp it tightly. And so that the ring does not slide left and right, pre-treat the wire at the attachment point with sandpaper with a large grain. This is an option for thick aluminum wire. If the wire is steel, and with a diameter of 1,2-2 mm or more, the best way is welding. Thinner wire can be bent and wrapped around the ring or also made a hook.
If you make hooks, wind the wire, the appearance is far from being as ideal as that of factory frames. But this imperfection will be covered by the lampshade itself. If she still worries you, find a ribbon of a suitable color (usually matched to the color of the lampshade) and carefully wrap the resulting frame. It will get much better. The tape can be smeared with PVA glue and, wet, tightly, turn by turn, wrap the frame around.
wire mesh
If you can find a fine wire mesh, you can quickly make an almost perfect cylindrical shade for a floor lamp, table lamp, night lamp, candle shade, etc. All you need is to cut off a piece of mesh of the desired length and width, roll it into a ring and fasten the wires by wrapping them around the racks.
To prevent the mesh from straightening when cutting off a piece, cut so that long free ends remain on both sides. They will fasten the ceiling of a cylindrical shape. And the imperfection of the upper and lower rings can be masked with a tape of the desired color.
From a five-liter plastic bottle
An interesting shape lampshade can be obtained from a large plastic bottle. There are bottles of 5-6 liters and even 10. Here they can be used. From the container we cut off the top or the bottom – depending on what you like best. In the cut off part we make a ring for the cartridge. If the top is cut off, a neck can be used for some cartridges. For those with a larger diameter, it will have to be cut off.
Then we cut out the excess plastic, form the rims and racks of the ceiling. In order not to be mistaken, you can first draw all the lines with a marker. Cutting will be easier. Everything is elementary. Then we just decorate. And yes, it is necessary to cut out the plastic, otherwise the warm air will have nowhere to go.
We make lampshades on the frame
There are enough options on how to make a lampshade cover:
- Sew from fabric.
- To tie. Crochet or knitting.
You can knit a lampshade cover with knitting needles or crochet - Braid with threads, twine, ropes.
- Decorate with ribbons.
From tapes
The easiest and fastest way to transform an old lampshade for a floor lamp or table lamp is to use ribbons. You need a frame or lampshade in the form of a cylinder. It can be “naked” or covered with fabric. If you use a “bare” frame, the light will break through the cracks, which will create interesting lighting effects, but the lighting will not be uniform. Reading in this light is inconvenient – this is an interior solution. If you need even lighting, cover the frame with fabric first. It can be the same color as the ribbon, a couple of tones darker or lighter, it can be contrasting. Everything depends on your desire. And remember that the darker the fabric, the less light the lampshade lets through.
We take a tape 1-2,5 cm wide. We fix it from the wrong side of the lampshade with PVA glue, additionally fixing it with a pin. If you took a wire frame without fabric, we attach it to the upper or lower rim (you can sew it on with your hands, you can use glue). Then we begin to wrap the entire frame, from top to bottom, placing the turns of the tape close to each other, but without overlap.
Having finished the circle, we unfold the tape 90 °. We fix it in this position (with a needle and thread or PVA glue, glue from a gun, temporarily fixing it with a pin, pressing it with a clothespin). Then we skip the tape under the first tape, pull it out, lay it on top of the second one, then pull it down again, pull it up through one tape. So, gradually, we create an interlacing, filling the entire lampshade.
Alternatively, you can skip two vertical tapes. But then you need to make sure that each next row moves one crossbar. Then you get a different type of weave. Such a lampshade is ideal for floor lamps, since it will direct the light downwards, scattering through the walls will be small.
In this version, the ribbons can be the same, they can be of the same color, but of a different texture, they can differ by a couple of tones or be contrasting. In a circle, the tape can be started all the way, or you can – after a certain distance. If you find a wide tape and apply it with an overlap, then horizontal ones will not be needed at all. And if you use a braided or twisted cord (in the lower photo on the right), we get a completely different lampshade in appearance. So only this technique of finishing the lampshade gives a lot of options.
Interesting options
Let’s briefly present the ideas. There are many options for how you can design standard frames for lampshades in a non-standard way. The first method has already been voiced: you can knit a lampshade cover on knitting needles or crochet. Several options in the photo.
Not everyone knows how to knit. It is easier to work with beads, especially if you glue them. You can decorate an old fabric with beads, sequins, beads of various shapes and sizes. You can make such a “new-old” lampshade with your own hands in a couple of hours. You select the decorations that match the color, coat the fabric with PVA glue, stick the decorations. To complete the look, you can assemble pendants from beads and beads that are attached to the lower rim, but this is already painstaking work. Although the effect is interesting.
You can sew a new lampshade out of fabric. But it is not necessary to make it an updated copy of the old one. Fantasy must be turned on! If the lamp or floor lamp is in the girls’ room, a new cover for the lampshade can be made in the form of a skirt. The style of the skirt is up to you. Interesting look in the fold. With and without ruffles.
In the boy’s room, you can use an old geographical map. They are on thick paper. If the paper is not thick enough, first you need to stick the card on cardboard, and then glue the lampshade from such a blank.
Original shades are obtained if the finished frame is braided with threads or ropes. Ropes can be natural. In this case, they are gray, brown beige. You can find thin synthetic colored cords. Of these, more “fun” in color products will turn out. The situation is even simpler with knitting threads. They are thin, thick, textured, with a smoothly changing color. In general, there are a lot of options.
We take the frame and braid it according to a certain pattern. You can start with racks. Braid each rack with a pigtail (the length of the threads should be 3 times the height of the rack). When this work is finished, we begin to stretch the threads / ropes between the racks. They will need to be passed through pigtails, so it is more convenient to do this with threads with a needle, and the ropes can be pushed through like that.
The second option is to first entangle the entire frame horizontally, and then braid the racks. A pigtail will no longer work here, you just need to fix the turns on the rack with oblique stitches with a certain slope. This version is somewhat simpler in execution, but the “pigtails” look more decorative.
Homemade ceiling lamps without a frame
Many materials are rigid enough to hold their shape on their own, yet malleable enough to be made into something interesting. There are a lot of such homemade lampshades. And almost all of them are worth your attention. We give here only a part, the other part will go in the photo section (see below).
From knitted lace doilies
Many people have crocheted napkins and they lie in the “stash”, because it’s a pity to throw it away and they don’t know how to use it. There is a very interesting idea – to make a lampshade for a chandelier on a suspension out of them. In addition to napkins, you will need a large balloon or an inflatable ball, glue for heavy wallpaper (vinyl, silkscreen, etc.), a brush.
We soak the glue according to the instructions, wait until it swells. Inflate a balloon or take a ball, hang it up. When the glue is ready, lay out a napkin on some clean surface, coat it with glue, put it on a ball.
It is necessary to lay out with such a condition that in the center there will be a hole for the cartridge. Glue the napkins one by one. They need to be laid out so that the edges overlap slightly. When all the napkins are laid, once again coat them with glue and leave to dry. When the glue is dry, blow off the ball or ball (the ball can be pierced if you don’t mind) and take it out through the hole. That’s all, the lace lampshade is ready.
In some cases, there are problems with how to hang the finished lampshade on the cartridge. The problem is solved simply – take a transparent plastic bottle, cut off its neck, if necessary, expand the hole to the desired size (so that it fits tightly on the cartridge), then cut off the plastic so that you get a ring 5-7 cm wide. Lubricate this ring with PVA glue , and glue it to the lampshade from the inside of the ball.
Round plafonds made of threads
Almost the same technology can be used to make round and semicircular stylish shades. Choose the thread of the right color. Their composition is absolutely unimportant – the color, thickness and texture are important. They can be shaggy, smooth, twisted, thinner and thicker. It depends on the appearance. It is most convenient to work with cotton threads of medium thickness. They absorb glue well and then, after drying, keep their shape perfectly.
You will also need a ball or ball. This will be the base of the lampshade, which sets the shape. Choose the size of the base as you wish. The threads will need to be glued, for this you need PVA glue. It is poured into a container, diluted with water in a ratio of 1: 1.
You can use other glue. It is important that it becomes transparent after drying. These are WB-29 from TYTAN Professional and D2 joinery adhesive. If you use any of these types of glue, read the instructions.
On the ball or ball, draw a circle, which will be slightly smaller in size than the lamp socket. On the opposite side, draw a larger circle – this will be the lower edge of the ceiling. Now everything is ready, we can start.
We coat the threads with glue and wind them around the ball in a chaotic manner. It is more convenient to do this if the glue is poured into a container – you can lower the entire skein there, and just pull the thread slowly. With glue in a tube, everything is not so comfortable: you have to coat sections up to a meter long, wind them up, and coat them again. Time goes much longer. This is if you do not use PVA. But on the other hand, the products turn out to be more rigid and do not sag, do not change shape over time, as can happen with filament lampshades on PVA.
When winding threads around the ball, we carefully go around the drawn circles. If you accidentally climbed into the “forbidden territory”, we simply move the threads, forming an even (more or less even) edge. When the threads run out or you decide that there is enough density, the process can be stopped. We fill the edge of the thread between others. All. Then we coat the ball with wound threads again with glue (PVA can be watered) and leave to dry (at least 2 days). To prevent the ball from rolling, we find a bowl or pan and use it as a stand.
The last stage is to blow off the ball or ball. If the ball has a nipple, press it with a thin wire, releasing air. Take out the dropped ball. That’s all, you can thread the lamp inside and test the lampshade.
The technology is the same, but the appearance is very different…
According to the technology described above, it is possible to make not only round shades. Rectangular, triangular, trapezoidal. Choose a base that is easy to remove, wrap threads soaked in glue, braid, even sticks, newspaper tubes, etc. After drying, remove the base and, behold, you have made a lampshade with your own hands. A couple of examples in the photo below.
Creative homemade shades for lamps, floor lamps and chandeliers
You just wonder what people don’t make beautiful and unusual things from. Plafond from a cup, grater, bottle, beer or glass can, metal parts and beer can rings … It seems that everything can be used …