…And Our Home-made Lampshade

And this was our take on a lamp shade. I used napkins, cut them into bird shapes and glued a single layer onto the shade with diluted PVA. I then embroidered little details onto the lamp shade as well.

Lamp Speculations and Ideas

I want to make a new lamp for my daughter’s room and bought some cheapo rice paper lamntern style lamp shades. When doing a bit of research I came across Taj Wood & Scherer. Their fantastical and whimsical designs really appealed to me because I think they capture the essence of children’s imagination so well! Their website really portray the essence of their style too.

My other idea I am sure you have all seen lately. There seems to be a trend for having a couple of rice paper lamps hanging down from the same spot. Of course now I couldn’t find a picture to show that… I thought it would look cute with two lamps in two different solid colours. Her bedroom is going to be all white with spots of bright colours.

Star Wars Themed Wardrobe (On a Shoestring as Usual)

I promised to post about how I’d painted the Star Wars image onto my son’s wardrobe. -I should really stop doing that… promising to post about something specific. It leaves me with no desire whatsoever to then post about it:-) In any case, here is how I did it. I’ve since been asked about a million times, by people much smarter than me, whether I projected the image onto the wardrobe and traced it from that… Well I guess that’s what a clever person in possesion of a projector would do… but appearantly I am neither of those things and so instead I did this:

This is the image I used. Now remember those drawing books we had as children, where you had one image with a grid of squares across it and then you had a larger area with larger blank squares and you had to enlarge the image, using the squares as a guide? -Well I used to find them very uninspiring and always skipped those exercises. However, for this is worked well. I used a piece of tracing paper (actually I’d run out and used baking parchment!), that I placed on top of my son’s Star Wars folder. I divided the tracing paper into squares of 1 cm each. I then figured out how much larger I wanted the image on the wardrobe door and as far as I remember, the squares I drew on there were 15 cm (maybe 10…?) The all I had to do was trace the image, one square at a time, being careful for the lines to start, end and slope exactly how they did on the smaller image.

Here’s how it looked when I’d finished: I didn’t bother too much about shading at this stage, it was really only a line drawing.

Next, I painted it, using acrylic paints. The trick here is to start with the background and also, use the lighter colours first, adding the darker shades for shadows and texture later.

Also, remember to prepare the surface to be painted sufficiently first. It would be such a shame, if the paint chips off too soon. So sand it down and paint with a primer first.

Another tip: Let the children help, but withOUT paint…

Some other things we did in my son’s Star Wars themed room included these pictures, which we printed out in size A3 and mounted in the super cheap IKEA frames, which we’d painted silver on the front (all of them) and each a different accent colour on the sides.

My son’s favourite thing about his new room turned out to be this alarm clock, which counts down from ten and lauches the rocket. It turned out to be my favourite too, as he now gets himself up in the morning!

I’d love to see some of your painted furniture or Star Wars themes kids’ rooms too, so please feel free to leave a link!