DIY kinda girl: Garage Sale Lamp Makeover

I've been searching high and low for a pair of lamps to go in our master bedroom. I wanted lamps that were tall enough to be effective reading lamps...so many are just too short! And let's face it, I'm cheap, and I was not liking the prices on lamps that I wasn't even lukewarm about. Thrift stores were giving me nothing, and so every night I'd be reading in poor light.

And then. I picked up a pair of these at a recent garage sale for $2.50 each.

Nice classic shape, but ugly as sin. It's all about vision though! Not long after, the July Create With Me over at U Create was announced: Lamp Makeovers! Perfect!

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the bases. Copper with that lovely greenish patina to them. Something kinda shabby chic, rustic, almost a little beachy. I wasn't sure what to do yet with the lampshades, so I just removed them and got to work. I used Sophisticated Finishes products for this job. First, the primer.

Then onto the copper.

One thing I wish I'd thought to do is this: give the lamps a couple coats of Krylon Metallic spray paint in Copper. Then do the primer, and continue with the copper. If I had done that, then my lamps wouldn't have looked like this after one coat:

It took seven coats of this kinda pricey product to get it to look like this:

(Ignore my messy garage.) Beautiful, though, right? So onto the patina.

This was kinda tricky. I tried applying it with both a foam brush and a regular paint brush. I think it worked better with the foam (the paint brush left distinct brushstrokes of patina), but I think best of all would have been plain ole cotton balls. Really.

I fell in love (along with most of the blogging world) with the burlap ruffle shade from Mama Says Sew, and so I replicated that. It was exactly what I was looking for, only difference is my lampshade curve out, so I filled in the wider parts with some smaller pieces of burlap. Oh, and let me just tell you, I burned my fingers with hot glue repeatedly doing this! (In fact, I kept yelling every time it happened, and my husband got sick of it after awhile...)

And now, the finished product:

I'm still kinda on the fence about the patina. I haven't sealed it yet since I'm undecided (and it will apparently go more green once sealed), so I can still clean off the oxidation if I want. What do you think?

And, as always, a recap: