Light Up Your Living Space: Redesign & Rewire Any Lamp | Bronwyn Tarboton | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


1.0x


  • 0.5x
  • 0.75x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 1.75x
  • 2x

Light Up Your Living Space: Redesign & Rewire Any Lamp

teacher avatar Bronwyn Tarboton, Home Decor DIYer and Actor

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:21

    • 2.

      Getting Started

      1:52

    • 3.

      Rewiring Your Lamp

      7:12

    • 4.

      Creating Your Custom Shade

      9:16

    • 5.

      Final Thoughts

      0:32

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

566

Students

2

Projects

About This Class

Show your space in the best light with your own custom lamp! (Even if your only electrical experience is screwing in a lightbulb.)

If you told Bronwyn Tarboton a few years ago that she would become a home decor DIYer, she would’ve laughed it off. As a Broadway performer the only craft she felt qualified for was acting. Then, during the pandemic things changed when some extra time in her schedule unleashed her inner upcycler. With a desire to fix up her home without breaking the bank, Bronwyn used found, broken, and pre-loved items to turn what others viewed as trash into treasured items. Now Bronwyn shares her DIY tips and tricks with tens of thousands of other creative novices on social media as @nyctrashtotreasures. Today, you’ll learn how to transform a broken or out-of-style lamp into a home decor piece that will outshine anything you can buy in a store. 

In this hands-on class, you’ll learn to:

  • Redesign an existing lampshade or make one from scratch
  • Use a lamp rewiring kit with no previous experience
  • Make your lamp completely your own
  • Revamp the lamp’s base

Plus, Bronwyn shares the surprising reason why even broken lamps can be a great source of inspiration. Whether you're an aspiring interior designer or first-time decorator, by the end of class you'll be ready to transform the most outdated lamp into a creative masterpiece!

In this class, Bronwyn uses a screwdriver, wiring kit, lampshade, raffia string, glue gun, and ceramic paint to redesign her lamp. Depending on what inspires you most, you might only need a few of these supplies. For a refresher on essential techniques or for more project ideas, explore Bronwyn’s full DIY Decor Learning Path.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Bronwyn Tarboton

Home Decor DIYer and Actor

Teacher

Bronwyn Tarboton, the creative behind the Instagram handle NYC Trash to Treasures, certainly never imagined she would become a DIY expert. But when the pandemic hit, Bronwyn, who had been managing a busy Broadway acting career, found herself out of work with a lot of time on her hands. Soon, she turned her attention to improving her apartment but since she had a minimal budget, she found herself searching the streets of Manhattan for free furniture that she would fix up herself. Before long, she had run out of space in her home and started selling her pieces online for profit.

Now, if you visit her instagram page you'll be able to buy lightly refurbished items and stunning pieces that have been completely transformed by Bronw... See full profile

Level: All Levels

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: I'm going to show you that you do not need to spend a lot of money to create stunning decor for your home, and just because something is broken does not mean you need to throw it away. My name is Bronwyn Tarboton, I'm a Broadway performer and content creator with a passion for home decor. When the pandemic hit, like many of us, I found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands. I started transforming whatever furniture I could get my hands on and sharing my projects online. Now, my social handle, nyctrashtotreasures has over 40,000 followers and has been featured in print and TV. I love showing people just how easy it is to make something really cool from something totally undesirable. In this class, I'm going to show you how to rewire a lamp that's not working and completely make over both the base and create your own bamboo-style lamp shade. Anyone at any level can join this class without previous DIY or electrical knowledge. You should take this class if you want to learn to fix a broken vintage lamp that you love. Or if you want to upcycle a cheap thrift store one into something chic for your bedside table. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Getting Started: [MUSIC] I'm so excited you're here and ready to demystify lamp wiring so that you don't have to throw yours away. In this class, I'll teach you how to rewire a lamp, transform the base, and create your own bamboo style lampshade. The results will be a trendy and updated lamp for your home that no one will believe you made yourself. Plus, once you have learned the basics of wiring, you can use the same skills to create pendant lamps and wire most kinds of lighting. Lamps are one of the most common things I find both on the curb and at thrift stores, but they often don't work or have outdated wiring, which can be a good idea to update anyway. If the lamp is working, then usually the shade is dented, stained, or missing. I'm also going to show you how to create your own lampshade as well as make over the base. For this class, I recommend starting with a small table lamp. The technique will work for any size and I've seen people make huge overhead pendant lampshades, but that will take a lot longer and require more supplies. To keep it easy, I suggest starting small. I'm working on a table lamp I got for $10 on Facebook Marketplace. Here's what else you'll need. To rewire the lamp, you'll need a screwdriver and wiring kit. To create your own lampshade, you'll need an existing lampshade or lamp rings, craft dowels, raffia string, a glue gun, and optional woodstain. You're all set. Let's create some space, layout our tools, and get going with the first stage, rewiring. See you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 3. Rewiring Your Lamp: In this class, we're going to completely make over this lamp. But first, I want to show you how to rewire it. Since this lamp is broken, so we're fixing it. Some pieces might be in bad condition, some pieces might be in good condition. So you can assess that if you want to, but the easiest thing to do is just to start fresh. That's what I'm going to do. We're going to unscrew it, [NOISE] and then we would just want to get everything out all these old wires. [NOISE] Then all the wiring is gone and the old sockets are gone, and you're left with just your lamp vessel. That'll be the same process on this one, even though it looks a little different like this one, the wires are connected, so we just want to get everything out. Same thing. This screws on. So we would just remove that so that we can start fresh. I'm going to focus on this one since that's what we're actually rewiring. Now, everything is unscrewed, we have it all gone, and we're just starting fresh with the lamp base. This lamp has a screw right there that holds it all in place. The next two things that you're going to need are your wire. It has the plug already on it, it has a switch, and the wires are like this, ready to go. Then my hardware store, I got a full socket. It came just like this. This [NOISE] has the screw that holds the shade on, and then it hasn't both of your parts. [NOISE] The holder, the top, and the inside. So you can get everything that you need in just two parts, the plug and the wire and the socket. The next thing that you need to make sure is that on one of them you have a switch. So switches can come either on the top socket or on the wire. It totally doesn't matter, the process is exactly the same. You just need to make sure that you have a switch somewhere. I have my switch on the bottom and my socket. So the next step, I'm going to take this [NOISE] apart and take it out. So I have this little wiring piece. Then I'm going to take my wire and thread it through the lamp. This one's pretty easy because it has this big open base. Some of the vintage ones can get a little bit more tricky. [NOISE] Take your wire and we're going to just stick it up through. I'm just twisting these so that I can get it easily through that hole. We got it through and we pull it up. There's our switch and our wires ready to go. So next, we're going to put it through the base. This is the stuff I always forget. So before you wire it, keep going and put it all the way through the socket base. We've got it through. Then this will twist right on here. This is a standard screw almost all lamps have this exact same size and you just screw it right on. I'm just reaching down here so that I can [NOISE] twist it on. So it's on and we have our wires. Now it's time to do the actual wiring part, which you are [LAUGHTER] going to not believe that this is all there is to it. So we take our wires, I'm going to split mine a little bit more just so I have some room to work with. One thing to keep in mind, there's two types of plugs: a polarized plug and a non-polarized plug. This plug is polarized, so it has one big and one small plug. This plug is non-polarized so they both look the same. You don't really need to worry about this. All you need to know, if you're plug is non-polarized, it does not matter where your wires go. They can go anywhere. So if that's the case, you don't even need to pay attention to where exactly I'm putting these, you can just go for it and you can't mess it up. This is a polarized plug. That just means that we need to make sure we put our wires in certain places. My kid came with a little card or I just look this up online to remind me that I need to put the wire with the ribbings. If you look at your wire, you can see this side has ribbings and this side is smooth. I have my little diagram here, so all I need to remember is that ribbed goes to silver. Now we're going to tie this knot. You have both of your wires, you're going to open it up side-to-side, and then one wire will go under, one will cross over like a little pretzel. Great. You've tied your knot. Then we're going to just sit that right there and now it's time to do our actual wiring part. You'll take your screwdriver and open these screws up a little bit. So I'm just unscrewing the silver and the gold. Sometimes it's easier just to do with your hands. We have them just loosened, we're leaving them on. We're just giving ourselves some room. Then we're going to do the actual wiring. We're reminding ourselves, ribbed goes to silver. So you'll take your wire, wrap it clockwise around the screw. So I'm wrapping it around. Once it's folded over, I'll just tighten that screw. Then we're going to do the exact same thing to the other side. So you'll take your wire, wrap it clockwise. You just want to wrap it in the same way that the screws going so that when you tighten the screw, it doesn't loosen it. You just want to make sure everything is nice and neat and you don't have like wire spraying anywhere. It's nice and neat. It's tucked in. You have ribbed to silver and then we're just going to tuck it back into the socket. So sometimes I might have left too much wire there, it might not fit back in. There we go. Great. Now your lamp is wired, we're just going to screw it back together and test it just to make sure. Let's put the plastic covering on. Here we go. Put it back on. This is just the socket has a screw. So before we go any further, let's just test our light bulb and make sure that we did it. Moment of truth. Yay, it works. That's how you rewire our lamp. If you test it and it doesn't work, you'll just want to unplug it and just check back in to see if your wires have gotten loose. Join me in the next lesson where we will be creating a new lampshade. [MUSIC] 4. Creating Your Custom Shade: In this lesson, we're going to create our own bamboo style lamp shade. We're going to use this ugly blue shade, which was the original shade from the lamp to create our own lamp shade. It's going to look completely different I want start cutting the fabric. I'm going to rip the fabric off, so that I'm left with just the metal ring You see, now they're separate. You can do this on any style or shape. It doesn't matter as long as you have two rings which you will. Let's rip it apart. Pretty interesting. You can see how lamp shades are made, is just two rings and some fabric. You're left with just the rings. I like to spray paint my rings so that they're the color that I want for my lamp. I'm going to be painting this lamp white. I'm going to spray paint this white to match and just blend in. For the purposes of this demo, I'm just going to keep going. The next step, we need to stack our rings so that they're the height that we want them to be. This is the part that's just a little bit annoying. We just have to hunt the home to find some things to stack so that it's the right height. Trying to create a stack so that it will hold the rings in place while I start to glue the dowels on. Once you've glued on a bunch, then it will hold itself up. But right now where it has no fabric, we just need something to set the rings on top of. The reason I'm not just sitting it on the table is because I want the rod to be able to be a little bit below and a little bit above the ring. The size of your stack is going to depend on the size of lamp shade that you're making and the dowels that you have. I order them in the exact size that I want. For this size of lamp, it'll take about 60 dowels. You'll want to order a bunch, so you have a little bit extra. When you order your dowels, they'll come just like this. You can do it just like this. I think it makes it look a lot more expensive if you stain them. I used a little bit of wood stain, I brushed them on over the dowel and just spread it around. Then after you stain them, they'll look a bit more like this. Let's actually start making the lamp shade. I have my stack which is the height that I want. I like to just line it up. The easiest way that I found for me is to put the hot glue right on to the ring, on the top and the bottom. You can see that one. I did it a little bit uneven. There we go. Then we're just going to add some next to it. When you're putting the dowels on, you want them to be close enough together that it looks like a lamp shade, but there's another room for you to tie a raffia string which we're going to do after. I'm just gluing the dowels. We just got to get through this annoying part. That one was not even at all, so I just slid it a little bit. I would not go any further apart than this. You could definitely go a little tighter. Once you set up your distance, you just want to keep it about the same. I promise once you try a couple of these, you'll start to get the hang of it. Once you have some dowels on, we're just going to turn it and do some on the other side so that it will stand up on its own. Let's just double-check again because this is where it really matters that it's on the center, otherwise your lamp shade will be wonky tire. We're starting on the other side. I have three on. I'm going to hope it's going to stand up on its own and play Jenga. We're going to take off the top book or Tupperware lid. I've used a cereal box, whatever you have. So far so good. I'm going to go back to where we started and keep filling in my dowels. Once you've done that, it's going to look like this. This is one that I made using the exact same dowels, the exact same blue lamp shade. I got these in a pair. As you can see with this one, I really took my time with it. I put them a lot closer together. I made sure they were lined up. But made it using the exact same process. Spray painted the ring white before I started. Now I'm going to show you how to finish off your lamp shade by tying the raffia string around. As you can see, I've already done it on the bottom and some on the top here. I'm going to show you exactly how to start it and finish it so that you can wrap yours all the way around. I usually do the raffia tying part on the actual lamp. Here's our other base which I painted. This is the exact same lamp, and it is just painted using the basic ceramic effect in white. You can learn all about that in my ceramic effect class and it totally changes the look of the lamp. Let's put our shade on to our lamp. When starting your raffia string, you want to take your roll and you want to start with actually quite a bit of string because the longer your string is, then the last time you'll have to finish the end. If you start with a lot of string, you might actually make it all the way around. You're going to stick the first part of your string through the back and then pull it all the way through. This gets easier as you go because your string gets shorter. Pull all the way through, leave a tail so that we can finish off the end, just like an inch or two for the tail when you want to tuck it down in-between your rods. I like to wrap up accordingly so you pull it through the front and then wrap it and then go to the back and then come back through the next gap. I'm going to take this end and just tie it down with a bit of hot glue in the back. Then I'll trim that end. Then we'll keep wrapping our other so that we can blend them together. You can do an extra if you want to be safe for this. You know what? I will do an extra just to be safe. That way I don't have two ends right in the same spot. I'm right there, I'm going to do a spot of hot glue. I think we got it. Your bulb in. We are totally done with our full lamp makeover. Can you remember the blue Smurfs lamps situation? This is the exact same lamp, but it's been completely transformed. I hope you've gotten some ideas. You can paint your base, you can make your own lamp shade, and you can rewire a lamp that's not even working in just a couple of minutes. I hope you've had fun and try some of these ideas out on your own. 5. Final Thoughts: Thank you for joining this class. I hope it's given you the confidence to rewire any broken lamp, or grab a free curbside or thrift store piece to experiment on. Now that you've completed this project, feel free to get creative and experiment with these ideas on a larger scale, and in your own way. Remember to share your work in the project gallery. I can't wait to see what you get up to. Thank you so much for joining.