Lamp Shades with Dionne Swift

Lighting up my life.

I enjoyed making lampshades with Dionne Swift. She showed us many valuable things on her one day workshop. One was how to make a lamspshade. Another was how to create designs on lampshades with free machine embroidery and an embroidery hoop to maintain tension. What fun and what good results. No sticky mess and ending up with something that has to be hidden. Every lampshade made in the class was gorgeous. Precise cutting and measuring and attention to technique is how you get a strip of reinforced calico and two frames into something that can shed light on your life.

Another lesson, for those of you whose idea of machine maintenance is a quick blow of the feed teeth and a polish at Christmas....was this.

Dionne, who teaches and also makes lampshades to sell, cleans her machine properly every half hour and has it maintained months apart in order to keep it in the condition needed to produce professional work. She changes needles frequently too, not just when they break and pays minute attention to the thickness and quality of sewing threads, the dimensions and tension of bobbins and shuttles and instantly removes fluff that builds up when she's sewing. I think that lesson and example alone was worth having.

For crafters and teachers, making lampshades is a must try. There are costs attached to the products and no real way of making this a cheap exercise, but the results are rewarding. We used free machining over fabric but you can dye fabrics, block print, mono print, embroider or create designs with pastels. Lampshades can be made from printed fabrics (100% cottons for example) or soft furnishing fabrics left over from curtain and cushion making.

For an idea of Dionne's work look at dionneswift.co.uk You'll see her products and workshops and the other good stuff she does too.

For a demo go to You Tube 'Make your own Cath Kidston Lampshade' for a brief video. (I will learn how to embed these clips so you just have to click on them)

cathkidston.co.uk

Then try it yourself and tell me about it.