Create a Lamp Shade with Color Slides

A lamp shade can be created out of your photos!

lamp shade made out of color slides
The slide mounts are not black they’re white. When light comes from within the slide mounts are in shadow, and therefore dark.

Make a lamp shade with your digital pictures that will preserve your memories for years to come. First, have your digital images printed into beautiful 35mm color slides.

Many of our customers have discovered this very unique gift idea. Imagine creating a one-of-a-kind lamp shade out of your digital photos!

The first step is to choose your digital images, and place your order for color slides with us. 

  • How many slides do you need? All color slides are exactly 2×2 inches square. Measure how high the lamp shade is and then measure all the way around the lamp shade. Keep the metal frame to hold your slides.
  • For example, it will take 24 slides to go around the lamp shade and then 10 rows of 24 slides to cover the entire thing. That totals 240 color slides for this example.
  • Imagine a grid 24 slides wide per row by 10 rows deep. Roll that rectangle into a tube and attach it to the lamp shade frame, for example, a large lamp shade is 20 inches high and 48 inches all the way around. Divide each dimension by 2. That means you need 10 rows of slides and 24 slides to make a row around the lamp shade frame. 

    Construction Instructions:

    • To begin construction of your unique lamp shade, remove the old covering, leaving the metal frame intact.
    • Drill 4 small holes in each slide mount exactly in the center of each of the 4 sides. Hook together two slides with a circular jump ring, and repeat until you have a row of 24.
      • Use needle nose pliers to bend the jump ring open and to close it. Then hook the first row to the top wire frame of the lamp shade with more jump rings.
      • How many jump rings do you need? For this example of 240 slides you need 4 jump rings per slide, or 960 jumps rings in total.
    Next, hook together 24 more slides with jump rings and attach this second row of slides to the top row. Repeat for the rest of the 8 rows of color slides until the lamp shade is covered.

    The last step is to put the lamp shade back onto the lamp and turn it on to enjoy your handywork! Rotate the lamp shade periodically to view different photos, of course.

    Create a unique lamp shade out of your digital images and our color slides!

lamp shades made out of color slides
Have you seen this on our Facebook page?

By George

I earned a BA in Photography from The Ohio State University and I've been producing slides with film recorders since 1996 when a 14.4 baud phone modem was "high speed Internet!" I've also scanned slides and negatives since then. Slides are my life!