How to Make a Simple but Beautiful Paint Stick Lamp

1. Start with a spare lampshade

To make a paint stick lamp you will want to grab some scrap wood and a lampshade. The lampshade I used was 11 inches wide. You will want to set your shade up onto the scrap wood. 

2. Stain your paint stirrers

You are also going to want to grab some paint stir sticks. I went ahead and stained my paint sticks in a nice chocolate brown color.  

3. Build the lampshade

To start building the new paint stick lampshade, I slipped a large embroidery hoop over my shade. 

I then used hot glue to attach four sticks to start. I glued them to the hoop at the bottom and the top of the lampshade.  

Try to get them at the 0, 90,180, and 270 degree marks. This will help to stabilize the hoop. 

Once I had all of those on, I flipped the shade over and slipped another large embroidery hoop overtop.  

With the lampshade upside down now, I glued four more sticks again at the 0, 90, 180, and 270 degree marks. I attached them at the bottom to the hoop and at the top to the lampshade again. Place these four sticks right next to the first four you glued on.  

With those all in place, I began alternating the sticks to fill in the gaps.  

I attached one stick onto the bottom hoop and the top of the shade and then one to the bottom of the shade and the top hoop. You don’t need to flip the shade over at all. Make sure you put all of the sticks right next to each other.  

How to make a simple but beautiful paint stick lamp

When you are done, you can add a light fixture to turn it into a hanging light or place it onto a lamp. How cool is it to turn some scrap materials into an easy paint stick lamp?