Blog Feature Friday: Henry Homestead

Hey everyone! I'm excited to introduce you to Rachel from Henry Homestead today. She was one of my good friends in college. Both of us were in the first class to graduate with an Interior Design degree from our school. She has some EXCELLENT ideas and is very crafty, so go check out her blog after you read this piece (which you can also find on her blog, here)!

Time to start sharing the details of the family room I showed you a few weeks (months?) ago.  Let's start with the fabric ruffled lampshade that I saw first on Crafty Texas Girl (via Centsational Girl), this is hers:

I had some major lampshade issues in this room.  I was planning on using a little yellow lamp from Goodwill, but no shade seemed to look right.

Yikes.  It's like a bad day in the dressing room. 
I ended up choosing the top left shade for the ruffle project because I thought that once I added the ruffle, it would be the right proportions to the lamp.
I started by tracing my lampshade to create a template, then used the template to cut my fabric to cover the white shade.  I really really like the fabric, and wanted to use it even though I figured it wouldn't let much (or any) light through it. 

Once I got to the bottom, I didn't like the way you could see the seam of the ruffle, so I glued it to itself to make a cleaner look...

I ended up doing that to the top and bottom to keep the ruffles together.  I put it on my lamp, and still didn't like the way it looked.  I decided it must be the lamp base, so I used a different lamp I had and liked it 100% better.  I don't have a great "after" picture (just like I didn't have "after" pictures of the whole room), but you can get the idea from these pictures...

Ruffle Shmuffle, fun project!  And since the edges of the ruffles are unfinished, I occasionally have to give it haircuts to remove the extra threads, but hey, who doesn't need a little haircut every now and then?  Give this one a try!--- it adds a nice feminine touch to a room without being girly.  I wonder how it would look to use all sorts of different fabric ruffles, varying colors and patterns?  Could be very cool! Again, you can get the full directions here.