We are lucky enough to live beside some lovely neighbours - and every set of holidays, we meet to do different activities together. To celebrate Bonfire Night - an important night here in the UK - we made some silk painted lampshades together. On the 5th of November, we light bonfires and watch displays of fireworks to celebrate the failed attempt of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament in 1605. This was our inspiration for these beautiful lampshades!
We started by outlining a design onto silk. It is important to keep the design fairly simple - the drama will be created by the paint! Draw out your design onto paper - we were using a rectangle template for our designs, with the measurements for the final lampshade taken into account. Flatten and tape a piece of thin silk over your paper, being sure you can see the design - and carefully go over the outlines with your gutta. It comes in metallic colours, so is perfect for this activity. Blow dry the gutta. Then make a frame to stretch the silk over - just use strips of scrap cardboard that you tape together at a size which allows you to stretch the silk and tape into place. The silk paint goes on better if you prop up your frame onto something. Just use small amounts of paint - it spreads quickly.
Once the silk paints were completed, we then made sure they were completely dry, before taking them off the frames. We trimmed them to size, then backed them onto lampshade PVC. Make sure your silk is nice and flat, and then smooth on the lampshade PVC. We were making lampshades suitable for use with tea lights - so our PVC was a rectangle that was just a couple of centimetres longer than the diamater of the tealight and around 12cm high. Once the silk was in place on the PVC, we trimmed the silk to the same size. Using high quality double sided tape down one of the short ends of the rectangle, you can make it into a tube. Put the tealight inside - and voila - a little lampshade! The kids loved this activity - they were absorbed by the process of silk painting - and the lampshades look so dramatic.
