Woman in Real Life

Value Village has over 350 thrift stores in the U.S. and Canada so there's a good chance you have one near you! My husband and I looked long and hard through all of the treasures at our local Value Village. I tend to be drawn to dishes and furniture, but of course you could also do some very nice upcycling of clothing and textiles too.

We had a few ideas circulating in our heads, and then we spotted this lamp. We had to have it. I love the rustic bronze look of the base, with the attached rings. To be honest, we thought it was pretty fine as is. But I knew we could bring it up a notch too.

I love books so I guess it makes sense that I also love bookends. We spotted these brown wooden bookends and felt that they were a bit dated in style and finish. Not too far away on another shelf we found our solution - Mr. Owl here. I don't think my fascination with owls will ever get old and this wise little fella is particularly nice and weighty - just the thing to add to our dated bookends!


The lamp shade, although passable, was a smidge dull. We wanted to jazz it up a bit. And you can see that the glue holding the original trim on had aged. It was very easy to pull off all the trim. I thought about wrapping the lamp shade in twine or perhaps spray painting it, but then suddenly I just felt burlap was the way to go. I turned to Pottery Barn for some style inspiration and found a number of burlap lamp shades on their website.

I googled burlap lamp shade projects to get an idea of how others had re-covered their lamp shades. Unfortunately every single project I found involved a rounded lamp shade. That left me wondering how difficult it would be to cover this rectangular, angular lamp shade. I felt that wrapping the fabric around the shade as most people had done with their round lamp shades wouldn't be the best course of action. After consulting with the husband, we agreed we should cover each side individually and then use burlap trim to hide the edges.


Here are the materials needed for our burlap lamp shade makeover:

• Burlap fabric (duh)
• Burlap trim
• Paper for a template
• Spray adhesive
• Glue gun

First we took the lamp shade off the lamp and stripped off all the old trim.


We made a paper template of one side of the lamp shade by placing the paper over the shade and creating folds. (We made the template a few inches longer than the shade to allow for the material to wrap over the top and bottom.) We then placed the paper template over the burlap and traced the shape onto the burlap with a pencil.


We cut out four pieces of burlap, one for each side of the shade. The one in the picture, above, was our first piece. See how the pattern of the burlap kind of waves? That ended up bothering us, but we simply positioned that side at the back of the lamp. The other three pieces of burlap are more even in pattern.

We positioned the burlap and hot glued the top onto the shade before proceeding with the spray adhesive.


The next part of the action took place in the garage, with the floor protected and the doors open to allow air to circulate. (We really need to get some proper masks too!) The rest goes like this:

• Spray the adhesive along the lamp shade smoothing the burlap fabric down as you go. 
• Glue any excess material under the shade. (My husband and I had an argument about this, because he wanted to cut the burlap exactly to size rather than wrapping it underneath. I won the argument but lost the war because now when we sit on the couch we can see into the bottom of the shade and the burlap edges aren't exactly even, which can bother us perfectionist types. The moral of the story is, if you're going to wrap the edges, make sure they are all sized exactly the same.)
• Cut four pieces of burlap trim to cover each vertical edge of the lamp shade. (We opened up one fold of the burlap trim to do this.) Hot glue the trim down each edge to cover where the panels of fabric meet.
• Wrap the burlap trim (not unfolded this time) around the bottom edge of the lamp shade, hot gluing as you wrap. Cut the trim once you've wrapped it all the way around. Repeat at the top edge of the lamp shade. (If you too are a perfectionist, you'll want the join in the trim on both top and bottom to end up on the same side so you can face it to the wall. Just sayin'.)

Lastly, we replaced the previous light bulb with an energy-efficient Philips LED (60 watt replacement) soft white light bulb.


And here is the lamp shade, all prettied up! We're sort of proud of our Pottery Barn-inspired burlap lamp shade diy. What do you think?


A Pottery Barn-inspired lamp needs Pottery Barn-inspired bookends right? This next project could not be easier! We decided to simply spray paint the old wooden bookends (and possibly the owl).


Here are the materials needed for our bookend makeover:

• Bookends (or you could cut a couple of pieces of heavy wood)
• Owl or other decorative object
• Sandpaper
• Spray paint
• Gorilla Glue

We first removed the diagonal decorative wooden piece from one bookend to make space for Mr. Owl. We bought new felt to replace the old felt, but really we only had to create two holes to get the screws out, so we left the felt as is.



We gave both of the bookends a fairly vigorous sanding with 80 grit sandpaper. I think the paint would probably work without sanding but we wanted to be sure.


Oh, the fun part. Again done in the garage on a drop cloth for cleanliness and air quality purposes. You can really see the bronze gleam of the paint in the outdoor light. We had thought to use regular black paint, but then we spotted this in the store...



Clearly we didn't have two matching owls, but I don't mind the mismatched bookends at all. They are made cohesive by the paint I think.