Paper Carnations

My daughter started school last week and we thought it would be fun to make some paper flowers for the teacher. I found this fantastic tutorial from Folding Trees.  It was a great project to do with my daughter.  The paper carnations turned out so realistic and pretty.

Lampshade Revival

I bought these two lamps 10 years ago and the shade is made from paper.  They held up just fine before kids, but the kids haven't been too kind with them over the past few years and they had tears in them.

I like the lamps and the shades are an unusual shape, so there wasn't a way for me to find replacements.  I opted to recover them myself with a cream colored fabric.  You can't tell from the pictures, but it's a diamond design with dots.  I measured the shade and cut the fabric out and hemmed the edges.

Next I hot glued it to the lampshade frame.

Then I trimmed the edges with double fold bias tape in a taupe color to give it a bit of contrast.

Moroccan Wall Stencil

I decided to try out the stencils by Cutting Edge Stencils.  I went with the Rabat Allover stencil and used it as an accent wall in my entry way.  I love the way it turned out!  This project did take some patience since I needed to put three coats of the brown paint on the wall, but otherwise it wasn't difficult.  I like the idea of wallpaper, but not the fact that its such a pain to remove later if you get tired of it.  This is much better, so when I'm tired of this color or pattern I can just paint over it.