I realised I hadn’t written a blog post on here for a long long time, sorry! It’s usually a sign that things are busy but no excuse really as it may look as though I’m not here any more. And I definitely am!
Lampshade orders are still busy and I have also run a few workshops already this year so all good. I’m also getting more and more into my art and on my second booking of a printmaking course at South Hill Park every Monday which I absolutely love. I’ve found my thing (aside from lampshades of course!) I’m working on a website for that at the moment so I’ll share it once it’s up and running.
I also work part time in Toast in Marlow which has been amazing for the social side and also for inspiration for my art. It means my lead time for lampshades is 3 weeks (but often quicker). I’m just trying to keep time in my diary for art every week rather than rushing through orders and running out of time for it. It’s all about balance isn’t it?!
So here you go, a few of the lampshades I have made recently. You can find lots more on my instagram feed here.
Get in touch if you’d like a lampshade made or recovered, I’d love to hear from you.
And if you’d like to follow my printmaking journey too, you’ll find me at Julie Gardner Art here. Thank you!
I thought it was a good time to do a round up of last year, we are over half way through January after all! I always find it helpful to look through and realise how much I’ve achieved.
gilhoolie 2021 highlights went a bit like this (see images below from left to right):
My workshop was built in our garden in the spring of 2021. Oh my goodness, it’s amazing! So nice to have a dedicated space to be creative, as well as somewhere to greet lampshade customers (and store all those ring sets!)
I attended a brilliant lino cutting workshop near Oxford which reignited my passion for the craft. It’s on my list to do more of this year. Read about my day here.
I made lots more bespoke machine embroidered lampshades – this is one of my favourites, I love the yellow French knots. I have just finished a commission but will be starting some more of my own designs very soon, watch this space! See more in my shop.
As 3 above – this is the finished lampshade – colourful flowers embroidered onto a natural linen fabric, with a navy braid on the top and bottom rings.
Gold lined lampshades were very popular with clients – this one was made using a striking wallpaper, with mirrored gold lining and a dusky pink trim.
I reached 1000 followers on Instagram – quite an achievement for me, and I enjoyed embroidering this foxglove to commemorate it!
I made lots of little candle clip lampshades and particularly liked this fabric from Charlotte Gaisford, they worked out beautifully.
gilhoolie house illustrations – these are still going on in the background and I’m always over the moon when I’m commissioned to draw one. Drawn in black ink, with a printed gilhoolie patterned sky, a message at the bottom and the option to add a pet (I’ll do my best to capture a likeness!) This was of a family holiday home, a bit different from the usual requests but great fun to draw.
Last but not least, we had to say goodbye to our much loved miniature schnauzer Arthur just before Christmas. I’m still heartbroken but feeling a lot better (most of the time…)
I think I’ll write a separate blog post on my plans for 2022, I’m still going through ideas in my head, in amongst working on lots of lampshade orders!
My workshop
Lino printing in OxfordFrench knots embroiderygilhoolie embroidered lampshadeGold lined wallpaper lampshade1000 followers on Insta!Candle clip lampshadesgilhoolie house drawingLovely little Arthur
Most of the time I’m working on orders that come in from interior designers who I work with regularly, and clients that find me on Google, from all over the UK. But when I get some free time I always go back to doing something creative, like drawing or working on my machine embroidered lampshades. I even bought a new shelf for my workshop to display them on (which I’m hoping my lovely husband will put up above my desk for me this weekend). Don’t get me wrong, as I don’t work full time I also get to do most of the errands and driving around, and housework, washing, ironing, gardening, cooking etc etc (but I’m not complaining!) I’m very lucky that running a creative business lets me do a bit of everything, including volunteering once a week which I love and find really rewarding (and lots of dog walks with friends, with the odd coffee thrown in). Can you tell I like to be busy?!
My next task for gilhoolie is getting kind of urgent now and it is to set up some kind of shop page on here so that you can buy these embroidered lampshades, or maybe I’ll just put them on Etsy, I’m not sure yet. They take a long time to make and the process itself is all very organic, that’s what I love about them. No two will be the same and they all feature my illustrations of flowers, taken from gardens I visit as well as the botanical books I seem to be collecting. I feel very lucky that I have the time to do this and now that I have my workshop to work in there are simply no excuses! The new space is working out brilliantly for making lampshades and being creative too, especially as I’m in the heart of the garden which is looking lush right now by the way.
Here is my latest lampshade creation in front of our new veg patch (lots of scrummy courgettes, tomatoes, beetroot, rhubarb, peas, French beans and broad beans in our cooking right now!)
And below are a few close ups going around the lampshade. The first is an allium as it’s opening up. The second is supposed to be a hellebore but it changed a bit as I started working. And I’m not sure what the third yellow one is but it’s out of an amazing book I found in Waterstones when we were in Bath recently. Spot the buzzy bee too, about to land on the hellebore!
This time next week I’ll be on a lino printing course in Oxfordshire as I’d really like to have a go at printing my own fabric again. I’m thinking about combining the machine embroidery with printing but not sure if I’m being a bit too optimistic, we shall see, watch this space! Thank you for reading…
Please visit my new shop to buy this embroidered lampshade and other one off gilhoolie designs.
I thought it was about time I shared some pics on here of my new lampshade workshop. It was built in our garden over a couple of months earlier this year. You know when you think, ah it’ll only take 2 weeks and then it turns into 2 or 3 months?! Well, that was partly our fault as we added some landscaping to the garden too, with a new garden path, a new flowerbed and two new raised beds for growing veggies.
Before I show you, I thought I’d mention why this is a good thing for my clients too, not just a nice space for me to work in. From now on when you come to collect a lampshade order, or come to enquire about lampshades, you can come round the back of our house to my workshop. There you’ll find lots of lampshade ring sizes to choose from, lampshade PVC lining samples as well as my plain fabric selection (a cotton from Villa Nova Seville). You can even bring your lamp with you if you like so that we can see what shapes and sizes will look best. I don’t have lots of samples of lampshades I’m afraid (being bespoke, everything I make goes out the workshop pretty much straight away). But I can also draw out your lamp base to size to help you visualise things.
This is my daily commute from the back door, across the patio and up the garden path:
I have been working out here now for a few months and I absolutely love it. The first week felt a bit strange being away from the house but now I’m so glad we did it. My lampshade ‘stuff’ (ring sets, PVC, cutting mats, equipment, art bits and bobs, lots of fabric remnants) had started to take over the house. And as I was using the dining room table I had to tidy everything away at the end of each day. Not great but on the other hand I also loved the space in the house and it worked well enough for nearly ten years…
My new workshop isn’t far from the house and it looks out onto our new veg patches, with peas, broad beans, rhubarb, raspberries, lettuce, beetroot and tomatoes. There is a new crunchy pebble path that leads from the patio to the workshop which feels a bit like walking on a beach but is also great as I can hear people coming up it towards me! I tend to get very absorbed in what I’m doing and am easily spooked otherwise!
We planned out what would go inside early on and I’m really happy with our finds, including:
A great workbench from Arbor Garden Solutions – it’s on wheels and is at the perfect height for standing and cutting PVC. No more back ache! There is also lots of storage underneath for PVC and ring sets.
A gorgeous quirky desk chair from Anthropologie (very me!) and a cute little bamboo desk from Ikea which is perfect for my laptop but also for my sewing machine.
A green metal trolley from Ikea – so handy for all my lampshade tools – no more hunting around in my tool box, everything is really accessible now.
The cupboard and shelving unit came from our house and were soon filled with fabric off cuts, my growing collection of botanical books and my embroidered lampshades.
Of course, Arthur has a bed out here too and usually comes and joins me while I’m working. Otherwise he’ll be wandering around in the garden next to me.
The walls and ceiling are painted in Little Greene Boxington and the woodwork is Olive Green. I decided to be bold, this space will be great for experimenting in interiors as well as art and lampshades! My next project in between lampshade orders and machine embroidery is to paint a mural on one of the walls of lots of flowers and leaves from my sketchbook. It’ll take a while but there’s no rush, I want to just add to it a bit at a time rather than planning it out. I’ll post more photos on here and Instagram once I have done some more (just a few flowers at the moment, it feels very strange drawing on a newly painted wall!)
I’m looking forward to welcoming lots more lampshade clients to my workshop. I’ve already had a handful collect their lampshades from here and it feels so much nicer and more professional than coming to the front door of our house. I just need to sort out a sign for deliveries as my husband is getting fed up having to take them all the time! I’ll add it to my list of things to do…
It’s not every day I’m asked to make a lampshade for an RAF fighter pilot. It’s more likely to be interior designers or curtain makers! I didn’t realise Clive was an ex fighter pilot until he sent me this lovely review after receiving his new lampshade in the post:
What an amazing story! I don’t think I have made a lampshade for an RAF fighter pilot before and I love the fact that Clive made the standard lamp himself too. It all sounds a bit like the Repair Shop doesn’t it?!
The lampshade itself was super big, and covered in a lovely simple geometric print linen fabric from Ada & Ina. Usually I would advise clients to steer clear of geometric prints for empire lampshades (smaller at the top than at the bottom) as the pattern tends to twist as you go round the lampshade, but in this case it all worked out really well.
For more ideas on fabrics for your lampshades have a look at some of our favourites here. And get in touch if you have a treasured lamp stand that needs a new lampshade!
Here it is in situ on the stand (always great when clients send their own photos to me too!)
A lot of my lampshade orders come from clients who find me on Google searches but I also have a few local Interior Designers and curtain makers that have been ordering from me since I started gilhoolie. It works really well and I love having a relationship with them (must try and grow this in 2021!) – I can advise them on fabrics as well as shapes and sizes of lampshades (see my guidelines if you need help with this). It’s also a great way for them to use up spare fabric that would otherwise go to waste or sit gathering dust in their workshops.
2020 has been a strange year but I have felt blessed that many people have taken this time to update their homes by ordering bespoke lampshades. The gilhoolie Design Assistance service that was going so well up until Covid has suffered a lot as designers have cut back but I hope that will pick up again sometime next year.
Anyway, I thought I’d share with you some of the orders from Interior Designers this year and give them a little mention at the same time. The main orders have been from Niki Schafer, Samantha Johnson and The Silk Road, thank you to all of them! And thank you to Sarah Wooldridge who lives along my road and is very kind helping with ordering fabric and samples for my clients, I really appreciate it!
If you are an interior designer who would like to discuss ordering bespoke lampshades with gilhoolie do get in touch, I’d love to hear from you…
Who doesn’t love a wedding? (I can’t personally remember the last one I went to and I’m sure they have been a lot different this year)… But I’m a bit of a romantic and they make me very happy and emotional, all is good in the world and everyone is kind (sorry, very sickly). So when Nicola emailed me to ask if I could make lampshades from her wedding table runners I felt a warm feeling inside (sorry again). What a great thing to do! And of course I said yes straight away. Who wouldn’t?!
The runners featured palm leaves in a gorgeous green and Nicola decided to go for gold pvc for the inside of the lampshades to add contrast. What a great combination. I have to say, it was a bit nerve wracking cutting them up and making the lampshades (not that I make mistakes too often, thank goodness :-))
Here they are – 2 really big 50cm diameter drum lampshades and a smaller 40cm one. I was so pleased with the finished result, very stylish indeed. More importantly, Nicola really liked them when she came to collect and is looking forward to putting them up when they move back into their house which is being renovated. I can’t wait to see photos of them in situ.
If you have some treasured fabric you’d like making into lampshades do get in touch! And read Nicola’s testimonial (along with lots of others!) here.
I made a note a few months ago to write a blog post once I had finished a really big lampshade order. But things have been so busy since then, I’m only just getting round to it, sorry! Some of lock down (especially the beginning when I was doing Joe Wick’s workout every morning and taking Arthur for a long walk to fill my time) was very quiet but the summer was pretty busy. I guess people were spending more time at home and wanting to make small changes to their interior that were easy to do from home. Great for lampshade makers like me 🙂
It all worked really well at gilhoolie in terms of social distancing – my workshop is at the back of the house so clients just came through the side gate and we discussed things on the patio, at a distance. I’m glad I could still see clients when they dropped off lampshades to discuss fabrics and linings, and especially when they came to collect their shiny new lampshades later on. I’m not sure how it’s going to work over the winter but as long as it isn’t raining I can continue like this without any problems. One of my jobs this half term is to start collecting quotes for building a proper workshop in the garden. I’ve been planning it out to make sure I have enough space for working, sewing, drawing and storage too, lots to think about!
Anyway, back to my biggest lampshade order yet! The order was for an interior designer in Surrey and involved lots and lots of different sized lampshades which needed recovering. Some of them were really big, I remember laying the PVC out on the lawn to try and work out how much I would need for them all. The client wanted them to have black fittings and gold embossed PVC linings. Standard lampshade fittings usually come in white but it isn’t difficult to spray them a new colour and it adds interest to the inside of a lampshade.
I ordered some graffiti primer, paint and varnish from VIP in London and when it arrived I set to spraying them on an old decorating sheet in the garden on a nice summer’s day. They looked great all shiny and black! I also remember sitting in our front room finishing off the lampshades with a fan directed at me as it was too hot to work in my workshop. As I write this it’s all cold and wet and gloomy outside…
I have been going through my phone photos taken over the last few months to find ones for this blog post and there are an awful lot of lampshades to share with you. Maybe I’ll do another post showing you all of them next. I often forget just how much I have done.
Here are a few of the black and gold lampshades at various stages of making, don’t they look smart?! I love the before shot with several lampshades that are dented and bashed, with Arthur lying in front.
If you have a lampshade that has seen better days, just get in touch for a quote to have it recovered with lovely new fabric and shiny new linings and fittings. Check out our lampshade guidelines and frequently asked questions for advice.
We were incredibly lucky to have our kitchen/dining room (which is also my lampshade workshop) decorated just before lock down and I have been meaning to share it on here since then so I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I adore this space. It’s so light and airy but also very cosy in the winter. I can step straight into the garden for a stroll and look at the flowers or make myself a cup of tea whenever I need a break. The only down side is that I have to tidy everything away at the end of a day and everyone obviously gravitates here when they get hungry (which is quite often when you have two teenage boys living in the house!) It’s been accentuated during lock down for sure with four of us living here. So I am seriously considering building a workshop in the garden where I can really get away from it all and absorb myself in making. But for now I’m very happy and grateful to have this space.
I have been busy working on my own machine embroidery designs which I will be adding to my Etsy shop. These are all botanical themed so far and I have used them to make cushions and lampshades. I’d like to come up with a collection that I can sell eventually but it’s early days as I’m trying things out and having fun experimenting. One good thing about lock down, I have plenty of time to do this and seem to be quite inspired! Yesterday I spent all afternoon coming up with a design and started cutting fabrics to stitch on.
Anyway, back to my kitchen/dining room/workshop… Here it is. The walls are painted in Little Greene china blue, with a slightly lighter tone in the kitchen area as it can be a bit dark in there at certain times of day. The wallpaper is also from Little Greene and is called Fern in sage blue. It wraps around two walls and makes a cosy seating area in one corner. I admired this wallpaper in one of Samantha Johnson’s designs in Taplow – see her gorgeously clever interior design work here.
We already had the two seater sofa which is from Made.com. And my favourite velvet Calvin armchair is from Atkin & Thyme. Glass pendant over the dining room table is quite old but I still love it (from Next). Lampshades by gilhoolie. Glass cabinet from Ikea. Anglepoise original 1227 dark blue ceiling lights from John Lewis. Dining room table and benches from Habitat.
So you see, what a lovely space to be creative in. Next project, our master bedroom! I have ordered new furniture but we need to get on and decorate before it arrives, I’m off to get paint sample pots…
If you would like to order a lampshade for your own house please get in touch. I can help with sourcing fabrics to fit in with your scheme. Check out my instagram account for lots of images of previous makes.
The weeks are blurring into each other more and more now, that’s for sure. Here in the UK we’re into week 4 of lock down and some days it’s hard to know what day of the week it is. Overall I’m still feeling mostly happy and incredibly grateful but I had a slight dip mid week. It was one of those days where I hadn’t planned what I was going to do and therefore I just drifted around and didn’t achieve a lot, looked at my phone far too much and generally felt a bit down in the dumps. It’s to be expected I guess. Sometimes I think it’s easier for people working full time as they have less time to reflect and worry about things. But then I know I’m so lucky that I have a bit of work and a lot of time to spend making the house and garden look lovely. Most days I feel like I’m nesting and really want to look after my family lots – baking bread, making cakes, cleaning and gardening (not that they notice those things much I think!) We have managed to only go to the shops once a week so far and it’s really made us think about how often we were going before!
What I’m going through each day is nothing though, I know that, compared to those key workers helping us all and putting themselves in danger of catching Covid-19. I’m very grateful to them. I live on a main road and most days it’s deadly quiet at the moment. Last night at 8pm everyone came out of their houses and clapped key workers as usual and it was as if we weren’t going through this pandemic, it was so uplifting. Any cars that drove through the people standing in the street beeped their horns and an elderly neighbour was outside his house playing music for everyone. I think when this is all over we should have a garden party and invite everyone round so that we can meet them properly (another down side of living on a busy road, you tend to just talk to the people immediately around you and don’t know those living even a few houses away!) I miss our old house where the gardens were close together and the kids used to chat over the fence.
What have I been up to? I have made a few more lampshades which were posted off to their new homes yesterday (see below). I particularly liked the small grey velvet ones on the left. I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately so I dug out some old photos of my family and framed some, hence the funny pic of my brother and I. I’ve also shuffled a lot of my ornaments around to change things up a bit, always good to have a clear out every so often too.
Yes, that’s me and my brother!Spotty lampshades
I’m still working through my big to do lists and adding more now that we know we have at least another 3 weeks to get through…
The weather has been amazing so I have been on lots of lovely long, sunny dog walks with Arthur. I stumbled across a beautiful clearing in the woods this week where we were surrounded by a carpet of bluebells. We lingered there for quite a while, I didn’t want to leave!
My gardening list is getting a bit smaller but I still have the not-so-fun jobs to do and now my enormous tin of paint has arrived I can get on with painting the two garden sheds, yippee! 😅 Arghhhh…
I promise I will show you photos of our newly decorated kitchen and my workshop soon. I just have to get around to taking some good shots. Here’s one of the door as a teaser. I decided to make my own door finger plate today, using a strip of the wallpaper we have used in the dining area (Hicks blue paint and Fern wallpaper, both from Little Greene. We kept the original green floral one on the other side of the door which has probably been there forever, I love a bit of history in a house!
Hicks blue with fern wallpaper finger plateOriginal wallpaper on the other side
