How to Make Unique Lamps

Lamps are a nice accent for any room of the house and they're a good starting point when trying to spice up your home. It's an easy project to either make a lamp yourself or give an existing lamp some creative touches. Start with a few decorating goals for what look you want to achieve with a unique lamp and the rest is easy.

Things You'll Need

• Lampmaking kit
• "Found" objects that you want to use in your decor
• Fabric, ribbon or lace
• Hot glue gun and hot glue
• Drill or other tools if needed to create your base

Instructions

1. Collect the items that you want to incorporate into your decor. Choose something that goes with the theme of the room. For example, you can use game pieces for a lamp in a game room, or antique jars or coffee cans in the kitchen.

2. Select fabric and ribbons to coordinate with the room's decor. If you want to cover an existing lampshade, choose a more sheer fabric. Look at ribbons to either go around the edges of the lampshade or run vertically along the shade. Consider beads or lace that might dangle off the bottom of the shade.

3. Modify an existing lamp by simply hot gluing the materials you have picked out to the lamp. You'll probably only want to add to the lampshade itself, as this is the easiest part of the lamp to modify. Measure your fabric carefully and glue it around the edges of the shade, adding ribbon or other decorative items at your discretion.

4. Transfer images from a magazine or printouts of photographs directly to a paper lampshade using typical decoupage instructions to make a decoupage lampshade for an existing lamp. A decoupage lampshade will have the interesting effect of illuminated images.

5. Create your own unique lamp using a lamp kit, available at most crafts stores and hardware stores. The kit will include the material for wiring the lamp, but won't include a base, a lampshade or a light bulb.

6. Make a unique base for your lamp using whatever object you want to display. You can use a jar, can, bottle, vase, fishbowl or other container as your base. Using some type of container gives you a place to store the wiring. You may need to drill a hole for the wires to come out of at the bottom of the base.

7. Add creative touches to make a unique lampshade to an inexpensive pre-made lampshade or by making your own fabric lampshade and getting a separate wire frame from a crafts supplier. You can add any decorative items you like to a lampshade, adding materials to the shade itself or having them dangle from the bottom edge, but just make sure that you don't obscure all of the light coming through the lampshade.

Tips & Warnings

• Take care to keep flammable objects and fabrics away from the heat produced by the light bulb. Objects too close to the heat can be dangerous.

Resources

• Lampmaking resources like lampshade frames and wiring