My crafty afternoon - ribbon lampshade

On Saturday, Dan was invited to a lunch with rich Jordanian business owners and I was not. He opted not to eat the mansaf (national dish of Jordan) but did have kanafe (national dessert of Jordan made out of same dried yoghurt as national dish). Naturally, he spent the meal answering visa questions and his Arabic was good enough to understand his tablemates complaining about the visa policies.

I spent the afternoon making a lampshade – not the least bit disappointed to be missing the lunch. We had very few casualties during our move – 5 wineglasses and one lampshade did not survive. I couldn’t do anything about the wineglasses but I did transform a plain white lampshade with a punctured hole in it into a beautiful striped masterpiece. No, I didn’t come up with this idea on my own – see here.

You need a lampshade, seam binding in a number of colors, bias tape, and glue.

1. Clean lampshade. Iron seam binding and bias tape.

2. Glue seam binding to one end. Glue seam binding to bottom. Trim.

3. Glue the next piece of seam binding – overlapping at the top (but not at the bottom) because lampshades are cone-shaped. Caution – do not use too much glue because it will show if your glue is thicker than the width of the bias tape. The glue seaps through the seam binding and is somewhat visible

4. Finish off the top and bottom by gluing a strip of bias tape. This just covers over the glue and the ugly edges.

5. Voila - doesn't it look nice in our guest room. You should visit!

I bought seam binding from onehundredwishes.com which has such a prettily designed website and when the package arrived it was packed so nicely it was like a Christmas package with tissue paper and pretty labels separating my seven different colors of seam binding. I have a lot of seam binding left over and it will be ribbon on all presents leaving here for the next several months. So if you get a Christmas present with inexplicable mud brown ribbon – it is probably the last of the seam binding.