On an evening walk before trash day I walked past a neighbor who had put a lot of boxes by her trash. In them I noticed a big book and inside the book was a collection of Thibaut wallpaper samples. What wonderful free crafting material! Thankfully it hadn’t rained that day so the paper was still intact.
I had also just saved an old lamp (I endearingly call it the egg yolk lamp) from the trash for a makeover. Because the wallpaper had bright primary colors I decided to combine the two into a one of a kind patch work makeover.
Watch the process in this video:
First I cut up a select few sheets of the wallpaper into different sized squares.
Then I deconstructed the lamp shade by cutting off the white fabric fan-like decoration, leaving a clear plastic base. This was the perfect surface to Mod Podge the squares over in layers. I made sure to layer the squares so that no plastic showed through and that hey lined up with the edges. The trim on the lamp itself was also chipping so I took black gloss furniture paint and updated that as well.
The paper didn’t line up with the edge of the shade perfectly leaving an unfinished edge. To fix this I thought a ribbon edging would look nice…but no ribbon in my stash matched. Instead I used one of my leftover neckties! The necktie got cut in half and hot glued around the top and bottom edge of the shade for a more finished look.
Finished!
When I turned on the lamp for the first time I was completely surprised by the way the light showed through the wallpaper. The way the squares overlapped created a more beautiful pattern because of the thin layers letting light through and the thick layers blocking it out. What a happy accident!
This was such a fun project and it only took a few pages of the free wallpaper samples! Have you ever found free crafting material in your neighbors trash? I can’t wait to use the rest of this fun find in other projects.
Happy Creating 🙂