Choosing the Style for Your Lampshade: Our Friendly Team Will Help You Design Your Perfect Lampshade

Gathered or Shirred Lampshades
Lampshades are made by gathering or bunching lightweight fabric, often cotton, linen or silk. This is an ideal finish where there is a pattern or stripe in the fabric design. There are a number of variations on this finish, as the fabric can be tightly gathered giving a striking effect, or more loosely gathered giving a relaxed country-style look.

Side Pleated or Pleat Gathered Lampshades
A straight tailored crisp fold, created by doubling the fabric back on itself with the width of each pleat nicely spaced around the entire lampshade. This style is more suited to plain fabrics and is perfect for making neat silk shades.

Knife Pleated Lampshades

Perfectly formed, the pleats are carefully measured to be exactly spaced, runing in the same direction and sitting more flush on the lampshade.

Tailored and Stretched Lampshades

This type of finish is particularly neat and stylish. It is typically used with shaped lampshades (such as bowed, square, rectangle etc) with the fabric pulled tight over each panel and stitched at the top and bottom. The various sections are seemed together and sometimes a trim is added where the joins meet.

Box Pleated Lampshades
A box pleat is created when a pleat or fold is formed on both sides of the fabric, and then the ends brought together underneath the flat piece of fabric. Another fold or pleat is made at the point where the fabric meets. The remaining fabric on both sides points outward and the above process is repeated around the lampshade. Another type of box pleat is the ‘English’ style of box pleat whereby a box pleat is followed by an open space of the same width, followed by another box pleat, then open space, etc. With an Open Box Pleat the pleats are adjacent to one another across the top of the lampshade, but they open up at the bottom. This type of pleat is visually better when the bottom of the lampshade is larger than the top, as with a coolie lampshade or a larger empire lampshade.

Fan Pleated Lampshades
Shades are box pleated shades, with the difference being that the pleated sections are reversed, creating a chevron type effect. Fan pleated shades look very stylish, particularly when lit at night and generally a silk is used to give the best effect.

Swathed-Pleated Lampshades
A lovely finish where the pleats are angled in the same direction, creating an elegant movement around the shade. Waisted frames work best and chiffon silks are often used to add to the dramatic effect.

Smocked-Pleated

Smocked pleated The technique of smocking is essentially a type of double pleating and the finished result is spectacular when lit and also beautiful with the light off. The first layer of pleating is most often a box pleat, typically a closed box pleat and occasionally an open box pleat. The second smocked layer is created when the sides of the box pleats are brought together creating a diamond like pattern in the pleating. The light coming through a smocked shade is dramatic, whether the shade is made with a full smock or smocking at the top and bottom, or just one ‘pinch’ in the middle. A fully smocked lampshade has pinches in the pleating near both the top and the bottom of the lampshade.