Can I just tell you

about my very chic vintage brass lamp that I bought for my living room at a thrift store?

At first, I thought it was ugly in a cool kind of way.

Then I thought it was ugly in an ugly kind of way.

Then I read about someone on the hunt for vintage brass lamps on some design blog, and learned that I was sitting on a gold mine.

So I kep' it, and that's when the very chic vintage brass lamp became the bane of my mortal existence. The thing is freakishly large and did not come with a shade (as Marisa and I lamented recently, one of the challenges of our tax bracket is never finding a complete fabulous thing) and apparently ginormous lamp shades do not abound at any stores in my state.
I LOOKED EVERYWHERE, PEOPLE.

I tried to make it work with a normal-sized lamp shade from Target.

It looked really special.

I tried taking the lamp apart to make it shorter.

I broke it.

I had to fix it with my pink lady-sized tool kit.

And then today, just when I had given up hope and was about to spend a ridiculous amount of money on what I thought was the only friggin huge lamp shade available in Utah, I decided to drop by the thrift store where I bought this evil chic lamp.

And what did I find, but the shade that I'm sure once belonged to my lamp in 1967!
It was broken! It was ugly! It was MASSIVE! And it was five dollars! I revived and recovered it using my mad hot-gluing skills, and now my lamp has a shade.

now here's a before and after picture (because i also painted those old windows and the tv table). the rug in the 2nd pic looks really gross for some reason. it needs a lot of attention. it's like a needy boyfriend. but anyway, there you go. you can see the lamp in the second pic. again, now that i've taken a picture it still looks sad (i hope i can blame most of this on bad lighting and/or my camera), but you know. baby steps, people.