Lamps!  They're super exciting!

I'm using those thingamajigs from IKEA, and a template for a lampshade that I found on the internets.  The internets will be a great resource for dollhousing on a budget because it has printables!  Printables will be your bff (best friend forever).  You will paint each other's toenails, you will gossip about the cutest boy/girl/alien/robot/otherwise unspecified together, you will call each other up crying over the season finale of that show that you both love.

Basically, printables are normal things but shrunk down to tiny size and flattened and put on the computer so they are printable.  I've seen everything from teeny movie posters, to 3-D foldable Victorian chests, to tarot cards, to whole printable dollhouses.

Anyway, I printed the lampshade on cardstock, scored the folding lines, cut it out, glue-stickified the fancy paper I wanted onto the cut out template, and cut around it one more time so I'd be sure it would match up exactly.  In case you don't know: I'm not very good at cutting.  Or gluing.  Art is hard.

I painted the IKEA thingamajig with five million coats of gold so that it would cover.  The gold picks up the gold accents in the super rocking paper I chose.  I used ticky tack to keep it still when I painted it, because, again, I'm totally not a delicate, graceful flower.  I'm more of a sledgehammer than a surgical instrument.  If I can make this look good, anyone can.

I wanted it to look as much like a real lamp as I could when you looked down the lampshade hole, so I took a clear bead and some wire and tried to imitate the look of a lightbulb by stuffing the ends of the wire into the beadhole and pulling until there was a loop, then flipping the loop. 

Then I took another wire, curved it into a circle so it would fit near the narrower part of the lampshade, and I had pieces that were too long so I could attach the shade and the lamp itself, and then I hotglued everything together.  Make sure to click on the pictures to make them bigger.  I took them with my cellphone camera, so.  Sorry for the quality!

Check it out, yo!  The glue stick is for scale. 

You might be thinking, "But Heather, I can't get to IKEAland, how do I make lamps and vases that look groovy?"  I'll cover that tomorrow, for sure.  Happy arting!  And feel free to leave comments on the blog-o'-blog!  I'd love some feedback.