How To: Ressurect a Mid Century Fiberglass Lamp Shade

I was gone all weekend on a trip, so I decided to take today off to catch up on my lost weekend, and to do some work as well. I found this old lamp shade for maybe $2 bucks at a yard sale here in Minot earlier this spring during the spring city-wide yard sale weekend. I saw it sitting there, my wife asked about it, and I don't recall the exact figure - but it was something between 50 cents and 2 bucks. We scarfed it up, and it immediately went into a box in the garage as a future project when we got home that afternoon (I have quite a few pending projects). As found, it was kind of a mess (as you can see from the first photo to the right). The leather lacing holding the fiberglass cloth on rings was dry, ripped, and torn away in places. The fiberglass cloth itself was torn and punctured, *really* grungy, and the lowermost metal hoop was dangling open, broken. Its condition was not good, but I thought I'd pretty easily be able to salvage it - I've never repaired one of these before, but how hard could it be? So this afternoon, I drove off to the local craft supply place and picked up a 25 yard roll of leather lacing from the bead department, and I was ready to give it a go.



The first thing I needed to do was to completely disassemble the lamp shade - which wasn't at all difficult given the shade's condition. It came apart quite easily by cutting through the remaining laces, and carefully removing the two strips of fiberglass material from the metal hoops. The fiberglass wasn't in as bad a shape as I had originally thought, but now I could clearly see exactly how dirty the shade was. So into the kitchen it went for a detergent scrub with a plastic bristle brush. I scrubbed it pretty lightly, but I did also give it a couple of squirts of blue cleaner spray where the stains were particularly stubborn. After a few minutes work, it was as clean as it was ever going to be again - still yellowed, but now much of that would be simply from age.

Next, it was time to address that broken ring problem. I don't have a welder, and I don't think I know anyone with a welder, either - and the ring is steel - so I wasn't sure what to do. I do have a lot of electronics supplies though because I like to repair old vacuum tube stereo electronics. Including a pretty nice soldering station, and lots of solid core wire of various gauges. What I came up with was to lightly sand the hoop to ensure that solder would stick, flux it, and then very tightly coil a length of 22 gauge solid core copper wire around the break in the hoop. I dabbed just a bit of solder on one end of the wire and tacked it to the hoop first to make this a bit easier. Here is what it looked like before I gave the entire area a good coat of solder. Problem solved - and plenty robust enough for a lamp shade which will be handled gently in any case.

Now it's time to get the fiberglass back on. I started with the double hoop for the bottom part of the top piece of this two-part shade. I tied a knot on the ring near one of the connectors to the other ring, and started feeding the flat leather lace through the holes. If you ever decide to re-do one of these shades, you definitely want to make sure that the good side of whatever lace you end up using is orientated toward the outside of the shade, and also to follow the original pattern of the lace (which was pretty easy in my case, as I could see the very pale places that the old lacing had been on a yellowed background. Here is what the shade looked like when I was just getting started restringing the lacing.

The actual re-lacing was the most tedious part of the whole project. You really have to make sure that as the lacing is threaded through the holes all the way around the hoop that it is flat, and that the lacing is as tight as possible. I gave up on this approach after the first loop was 'finished' when an inspection revealed that there was quite a bit of slack in the lacing in some places. What I did after that was to lace the loop onto the fiberglass more loosly (in other words, don't worry about how tight the lacing is at first), and then when it was on and nice and flat, I would secure the end with a kitchen bag clamp (like for potato chips). I then started working my way around the loop from the tied end, taking out slack and tightening up the lacing all the way around as I went. When I got to the end, I just tied the two ends together with a double knot. This approach worked like a charm. Here's the top strung up -  just about to get started on the bottom.

The bottom went a bit more quickly even though it's larger - just because I had figured out the method. I started threading the lacing through two, and then three holes at a time. This really helped to get the process moving rapidly. Here is what the bottom looked like as I was just about finished tightening up the lacing on the first ring. You can see my kitchen bag clamp holding the lacing from moving around as I was working the lace around the lamp shade. The other thing that the clamp really helped with was to hold the lose fiberglass material up when starting to loop the lacing through the eyelets. If you don't have some means of holding the fiberglass cloth to the loop, it just want to fall over and annoy you. Trust me.

Here is what the shade looked like when I was finished. It came out really nicely. Notice that the overlap of both the top and bottom parts of the shade line up on one side - this is important when you're starting to lace the leather through the eyelets - the shade would look pretty bad if both of the seams didn't line up and go in the back when mounted to a lamp base. As you can see from this picture, the light really accentuates the overlap. It would look strange with the overlap offset around the shade. I think now, I would be willing to source my own fiberglass cloth and make my own lamp shades, something I've been reticent to try until now.

I do not have a lamp base for this shade to go on, but it's going to go into a box and into storage for the time being - these nice big real vintage double fiberglass shades go for some pretty hefty bucks - if you've ever looked for one for a vintage lamp base, you know just how pricey they can be. this one cost me a total of $14 bucks. $2 for the shade, and $12 for 25 yards of leather lacing. Altogether, I think this project took me about two hours to complete. By far the repair work to the hoop, and the lacing took the longest to get done. Here is what it looks like on my green lucite lamp base. I really dig the swirling fibers that are impregnated in the fiberglass cloth of this shade. The nice light color and non-painted cloth will match well with whatever lamp I decide to put this shade on down the road as well.