$5 lamp

I picked this lamp up at a garage sale a few months ago.

She was only $5, but I actually really agonized over buying her. Her brass was UGLY and her shade was worse – but my real dilemma was that I had no where to put her.  In the end, the deal won out over the practicality (like it always does!) and I shelled out 5 big ones and took her home.
Even without knowing where she was going to live I knew Heirloom White was the color for her.  Honestly, I haven’t found too many things that DON’T look better in Heirloom White.

Dear Rustoleum,
Thank you for developing the most perfect, clean, creamy color ever.
Love always, 
Mandy


Anyway, I gave her a couple of light coats and completely transformed her.  Suddenly her super-retro (in a bad way!) base was just perfect – traditional and clean and just…perfect.

I’m in the middle of a (slow-going) master bedroom update, and one day I decided the lamp on my bedside table could really stand to be changed out. So now she had a home…all she needed was a shade!

The pleats on this thing were really too much for me.  But I liked the way this shade fit. It had much less of a taper than on most shades and the top had a spot for the little finial to screw in to.

So I gave the pleats a gentle tug and was thrilled when they came away from the base. As I tugged…pulled…yanked…I hit some spots where the adhesive was much stronger and ended up taking some of the base with the pleats.  This is how she ended up.  Sorry about that, lamp shade.

When it came time to choose a fabric I was stumped. I thought about brown (one of the main colors in the master bedroom) but didn’t feel great about it. The poor shade sat naked and broken for almost 2 weeks before I thought of burlap.  I was a burlap virgin until this point, but it was the PERFECT choice for this lamp.  The rough texture is the perfect compliment to the almost fancy base. LOVE it!

P.S. – I covered the holes in the shade with cardstock. If I find a shade with the same proportion I’ll probably pick it up and replace it, but in the meantime my ghetto cardstock solution is getting the job done.