Typical Tuesday: DIY Candle Shades (con-tain-it)

Typical Tuesday: DIY Candle Shades

Because you never know where your inspiration will come from...

hence...while working on my RUSH project for this upcoming event:

A Sorority is Born: Friday, Jun 26, 2010

I was searching for some inspiration and while flipping through one of my idea books (told you all about here in this post) I stumbled upon this old clipping for making candle shades...

The writing on th magazine clipping says this: "You can make these candle shaded from pleated window shades." NOW, I have had this clipping in this blank book for over 7 or so years and I always thought it was a neat idea and that I'd make them out of pieces of vellum or scrap-booking paper that I pleated like a fan...I know it is that old because the I used a corner rounder on the photo's corners! ha!

I'm telling you it was a light bulb moment cause guess what I had left-over from this window!

The day I found this kit in the hardware store for this pleated, fan-shaped window shade I was doing the happy dance! Mainly because I just did not know what to do for a window treatment since the large, bottom window is closed with with our "library" bookcases and the top, palladium window STILL let's in so much sun and heat that it needed to be covered...I'm telling you the sun was blinding me ;)

It had to be a woman who came up with this nifty, quick and inexpensive solution for these windows! You simply measure the width of your window, cut the shade with the measuring tape that is printed right on the shade...then peel the protective paper strip away from the adhesive strip (that is also included) and set the pleated fan-shaped shade inside the clear plastic holder at the base and set it in your window. There are also extra adhesive strips if you want to stick to your actual window ledge...which I did because we have a ceiling fan and I wanted it to stay in place! ALL this for under $25.00 and installed in less than 10 minutes...cool beans!

OKAY I digress once again...sorry...so I held onto the extra shade part that I trimmed away because I just knew that I would find a use for it (I'm such a hoarder when it comes to paper ;)

So I gathered my left-over shade, some canning jars to hold some candles and adhesive:

Then I stood up my paper shade and wrapped it around my canning jar to see where I wanted to cut the shade...cause I knew I had more than enough to make several candle shades. I wanted there to be enough of the paper pleats to set around the jar without being snug up against it.

So, once I was satisfied with the measurement, I simply cut the paper shade and laid it down to apply my adhesive. Now I used the Zips Clear Adhesive Lines because they stick well and are easy to place with their removable, protective strips.

That's it...peel protective strip...adhere the other side of your paper shade and pop it on over your glass candle holder...if you have those fancy candles in jars...then you are all set! I don't have those because I tend to use tapers for my candelabras.

This was so quick and easy and I can see these for a July 4th Bar-b-que table-scape! I shut off the lights in the kitchen so that you could see how pretty they'd be on your patio...

You could use paper or vellum just as easily...but I really like the reflections that the canning jars have on the paper...these jars have embossed images of fruits/veggies and the brand name which were all reflecting in the paper shades.

Well that is all for my Typical Tuesday: DIY Candle Shades...hope you all enjoyed it. This would also be a great project for the kids to help with (as far as the paper pleating part :) Hope you all have a great evening, fondly, Roberta

houzz