Oh dear, another dilemma at gilhoolie! This time, what to cover my big antique lampshade in. I’ve been trawling the internet since I stumbled across my lovely lampshade and base in an antique shop and finally made a decision today, hooray!

You know when you have an idea in your head and you just can’t find the right combination of pattern, colour texture etc? This was one of those occasions…

I decided to go with something quite traditional to match the base and even though I’m not much of a rose person, I really like this antique rose floral bouquet on beige by Lecien, from Cool Calm Collected. I hope it’s as beautiful in real life, that’s the only problem with ordering fabric, or anything else over the Internet!

I’ve also been thinking about ideas for a machine embroidered lampshade and as butterflies and bugs seem to be in at the moment I sketched a dragonfly last week and had a play around with it in Photoshop. I’m not sure how it’s all going to look in the end but it’s fun experimenting and a good excuse to have a go at some machine embroidery again later this week hopefully. It couldn’t be more different to my antique lampshade but it’s good to mix things up a bit!