Crafty Thursdays: Vintage Slide Lamp Shade

Today we're making lamp shades out of vintage Kodachrome slides. We used slides that my crafting buddy Pat's sister found tucked away in the back of her garage. If you don't have slides of your own, you can find them at estate or garage sales or on eBay. Some of the eBay prices can be crazy depending what the slides show. 

Materials:

• Lamp shade (we used top diameter of 8 inches)
• 10 MM base metal rings (we found ours at Michaels)
• Kodachrome slides 
• Scissors 
• Lamp base
• Small hole punch
• Light Bulb

Step One: 

Remove the covering from the lampshade you bought. The goal of this exercise is to get to the bare wire of the lampshade frame to use this as your frame for the slides.  The toughest part of this step was getting the glue to come off the wire frame. Ultimately it took a combination of Goo Gone (industrial goo remover available at most hardware and grocery stores) and a SOS pad.  You really only need the top part see photo below. 

Step Two: 
Arrange all the slides that you want to use for the project.  Find slides with like subject matter or colors. Make sure they're all either landscape or portrait orientation (vertical or horizontal.) You can mix them up if you want, but the will lampshade look less uniform. I like this look better.  You’ll need four rows down and XXXX across. Make sure they are all right side up and facing the direction you want. I prefer to not have any lettering if I can avoid it. (I know this picture shows that we didn't do this until after punching the holes. It would be easier to do it before.) 

Step Three: 
Get your small hole punch and punch one hole on each corner of one slide. Take care to make the holes the same distance from the edges. I eyeballed this, but if you are a perfectionist, you may want to measure it. You can use a slide will act as your template. Next punch four holes in XXXX slides. 

Step Four:

Now you are ready to start assembling the slide shade. Take your little jump rings and force them open with your fingers. You can also use pliers for this, but it’s faster if you don’t need them. You are going to attach the slides to one another using the rings. You can see how they are connected in this photo:

Step Five (Optional):
If you have a cat you should encourage him or her to sit on the project while in progress and wag their tail. This makes the final lamp shade turn out better. It also means you get to pick up tiny rings from the floor where they landed after a giant tail swish. 

Barnum surveys the project:

Step Six:
Once you have that completed you are ready to start putting it on the lampshade. Use a ring for every hole at the top of the lampshade. It’s important that each slide has two rings attached to the top so the lampshade hangs straight.  We used a wine bottle to hold up the shade while we worked. 

This gives you an idea of what the lamp shade look like on the inside. You have to put rings on either side of each slide to connect it to the top, otherwise the slides hang crookedly. Here's what it looked like when we didn't have two rings per slide. It's on top of the puzzle table. 

Step Six (Optional): 
Now you can string your crystals and hang them from the holes left at the bottom. Or you can just be done. 

So that's how you make a lampshade out of vintage Kodachrome slides of critical. We're not giving this one away, but you never know what we'll be up to next week, so come on back.