Monkey Lamp Madness: The Bow-Chica-Bow-Wow Bedroom Makeover

We may never know what compelled me to purchase the monkey lamp so many years ago. Or why I even kept it after all of these years. But, verily, it has achieved its destiny in our master bedroom, and is one of the accessories I chose to makeover as part of our big master bedroom project. 

Let's back up for a moment, because the lamp obviously didn't always look like this. The picture below isn't even a true "before" picture. This is three lamp shades removed from the original. The original shade was a lop-sided, slightly damaged frame with a heavy 70's rust fabric exterior finished with beaded trim. Awwwww yeeeeaaah.....not that this shade is much better. 

So, after years of not being completely satisfied with this lamp, I finally did something about it.

I painted the base in a glossy white, and then got to work on the lamp shade. I used the exact same fabric fish scale technique that I used in this dishwasher detergent project. I started at the bottom by hot gluing half circles around the base...

...and worked my way up the shade, layering 2" circles as I went. I used a tiny drop of hot glue at the top of each circle so that the circles could hang freely.

Once I neared the top, I added another row of half circles at the very top of the shade frame, and then layered on my last row of circles.

At one one point I looked down and realized I had a squatter in my lap. She saw a vacany and jumped on the opportunity!

So, with the dog in tow, I cut two thin strips of fabric, slightly longer than the length of my shade circumference. I folded (and glued) along one edge of the fabric to make a long seam.

I folded over (and hot glued) one short end of the fabric.  

Using this short seam as my starting point, I began gluing the fabric strip, seam-side down along the bottom of the frame, covering every last inch of the old shade fabric. I trimmed off the excess fabric (length-wise) and folded the edge over so that the two end-seams met nicely. I folded the remaining excess fabric into the shade and glued it to the inside of the frame.

I repeated this process with the top side of the shade. I made a short cut in the excess fabric at each of the frame spokes, so that I could easily glue the fabric to the inside of the frame.

And then I was done!

{funky chicken happy dance}

Cheers!!

PS. I'm linking up here: