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With Mother’s day around the corner, Marliese Richmond of Three Bears Prints, shares with us the process of capturing special children’s drawings in a unique lampshade. It’s would make a fantastic gift for Mum or Grandma!
Marliese’s little helpers are just five years old making it the perfect creative activity to span over a couple of weekends or even for a wet Easter Holiday.
First of all, you have to create a design! The two girls worked up their ideas using coloured pencils.
You can see their finished drawings here. The next stage was to scan these in, and adapt them into lampshade designs. Dannells has a fantastic fabric printing service, which you can use to have your own designs printed up as a lampshade. By giving you a template to work with, with all the dimensions in place it can then be transformed into a lampshade by sharing it with them digitally. Having gone through this process, especially if you are doing this with children, I would recommend locating the key motifs in the centre, with a background colour both above and below these motifs, so that you have a margin for error!
Here, you can see their fabric print outs ready to be adhered to the lampshade covers!
The lampshade kits have everything you need to make a lampshade – it is easy to do.
Start with the PVC cover. You need to line it up on the fabric so that the motifs are aligned appropriately. To make it easier for the children, we drew round the PVC cover on the back of the fabric, so we knew exactly where we’d be sticking it.
Once you are confident you know where the PVC should be placed, take your time sticking it onto the fabric. If you are working with a child, you may need to help them with this. It is important that you help them to apply it smoothly, avoiding any wrinkles in the fabric.
Trim the excess fabric off. You can see I do this with a craft knife – I helped the girls to do this.
(Due to the Scottish weather, we had to move inside at this point!). Next stage is to prepare the lampshade rings. Carefully stick on the double-sided tape onto the rings. The girls were extremely competent at doing this – and loved peeling off the backing with a flourish! When working with children doing something artistic, I think it is very important to enable them to do as much as possible, and not to ‘interfere’.
The two sticky lampshade rings now have to be applied to the lampshade PVC. Start in the middle of the PVC, with the rings perpendicular to the covering. It is easier to do this if there are two of you – we each took one ring. Use tape to stick down seam.
The last part is to use the tool included in the kit to tuck the edge of the fabric under the rings. This is quite tricky, so I did this part.
One finished lampshade! This one features a bird and a cactus…
… and this second one is decorated with wonderful unicorns, rainbows, mermaids and butterflies!
The two final lampshades, which have turned out beautifully. Using the fabric printing service and the lampshade kits from Dannells, you too can create your own, unique lampshades – or encourage your children to do a design for their room
We think these are simply gorgeous and a great way to encourage children’s to get creative!
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