Shades of Magnolia

She-Who-Worships-Pink is going to be a designer of some sort, I'm sure.  I just hope it's not fashion; she's WAY too fond of frills, flounces and florals for my taste.

Our girl loves flowers, she picks them everywhere she finds them (except from people's gardens - we've talked about that!), she gets me to buy her fake ones whenever we come across them and she even asked me to turn her bedroom light into a giant flower.

Since the local council planted a magnolia tree outside our house we've both become quite partial to that particular bloom. 

So this was the challenge:  to transform an ugly ball-globe light fitting (which we inherited with our home) into a gorgeous crimson magnolia.

I started out with some heavy pattern making paper and just chopped, shaped and measured until I  came up with something I thought would work.

I cut out around seven or eight petals from fabric and iron-on stiffening. I re-used some plastic meat-trays (well washed) cut into strips to make 'bones' for each petal's center.

I sewed the petal seams up, clipped the curves and turned them right side out then top-stitched the edges.

After that I inserted a bone into each one and sewed that in place on the outside.

Measuring the base of the light fitting, I then overlapped my petals leaving a hole in the centre to sit nicely around the fitting, before basting a line of stitching to hold everything in place.

The only thing left to do was bind the top edge with Bias-tape and hang it up.

My only design issue with this light shade is that it shades too much of the light. Next time I think I'd use a lighter more transparent fabric and hang it over the original globe/ ball fitting so it wouldn't get too hot. I thought it would make a really nice cover for an ordinary lamp-shade - but that will be another project later down the track.

But Pinkster loves her magnolia bedroom light and that's the main thing with our craft sessions; to keep our resident art-director engaged in creating and coming up with ideas.