Victorian Lampshade Recovering

Premier Lampshades has just completed another victorian Lampshade Recovering and restoration project, and would like to share our experience of how we achieved it with you.  We had a very old antique Victorian lampshade picked up from a lady in Surrey by our couriers.  We offer this service where we send out a box to a customer, then when the customer has boxed their lamp shade, we ask them to phone us to let us know that it is ready for pick up.  We then send our couriers to pick it up and return it to us ready for restoring.  We are finding more and more these day`s that customers love this service due to the fact that they don`t have to do anything, like finding a big enough box and taking it to a couriers or post office to send to us.  They can just get on with their every day life.

Picture 1: The lampshade was made in a holly green silk fabric on the main body part and had a satin gold crown top and bottom with holly green fringe and mixed holly and gold ruffle tassel's, it reminded me of the lamp shades that you see on the TV programme Downton Abbey.  This lampshade was extremely well made on the outside and inside, you can tell by the picture they made things to last in the good old day`s, however our customer was changing her room decor and needed her lampshade made to match the colour scheme in her living room.  This is were Premier Lampshades come in with over 35 years experience of Victorian Lampshade Recovering and restoration.

Picture 2:  This is showing the lamp shade being taken apart, being extremely careful not to rip the fabric on the main body of the lampshade.  We needed the fabric to be intact for templates to cut around the new fabric later in the restoration project.  You can see we also removed the fringe, tassel's and braid without damaging it, the customer had asked for them to be returned.  It was rather tricky to do this because it was sewn to the main body of fabric and every stitch needed to be individually cut without damaging the fabric.  The crown is a little easier to remove than the fringing.  You just take the braiding off that hides the joint from the crown to the main body then just cut the remaining stitches that hold the two together.

Picture 3:  You can see both the crown and the main frame totally stripped down.  This is were we use a binding tape like shown in the picture, to bind all the frame, getting it ready for the new covers.  This is a very tedious job and can take one or two hours to complete, i would rather let my wife do this while i get on with other lamp shade making.

Picture 4:   The centre gimble fitting was discoloured and chipped, so we removed all of this down to the bare wire frame as shown in the picture, preparing it for a respray in a white enamel gloss paint.

Picture 5:  Here you can see the centre fitting being re-sprayed to make it look brand new again.

Picture 6:  I was waiting for a dry day to re-spray the frame so i could hang them outside to dry.  I should have known better, our typical British weather let me down, rain rain and more rain.  It did not stop raining for 4 consecutive days.  This is why you see them hanging up in our work shop.

Picture 7:  Once we had cut out the new fabric panels and sewn them together, we fitted them on to the new looking frames, ready for bonding with our low odour cyanoacrylate super glue. 

Picture 8:  Here you can see us cutting off the surplus natural cream fabric at the bottom of the lamp shade, then fitting the crown top back on to the shade.  We use a different method these day`s to put the crown back on to the lampshades.  We bond it to the frame with an hot melt glue gun.

Picture 9:  Take a look at the finished lampshade in all its glory, here you can see all the beautiful trimmings and natural fabric`s that it took to re-make this fantastic looking Victorian lampshade.  If you ever watch Downton Abbey on ITV you will see lampshades that are quite similar to this one, if you don`t watch Downton Abbey you are really missing out on a fantastic TV programme.  If you have Victorian Lampshade and would like it recovering or any lampshade restoring please phone Ian on 01204 414366 or please visit our website www.premierlampshades.co.uk for more information.