We had the unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it) occurrence recently of being ready to buy the lamp for the nursery at the exact time that both my local Target and Pottery Barn, were both sold out of the baseball bat lamps that they carry. I was really just going to buy one, but Chris had been insisting that he could make me one instead for the few weeks before that, so we decided to give it a go.
It turned into a pretty fun little project and a cute little baseball-themed add on for the room.
Oh my goodness, friends. It’s been so non-stop overcast here lately, so this picture is all kinds of terrible, but you can see the room is coming together pretty nicely now. It’s to the point that Chris thinks it’s done (it’s not) and he keeps patting himself on the back and rubbing it in my face that I thought we wouldn’t have it completely finished by the time the baby got here. Of course, I still have about 73 more little details I’d like to work ok, but to a normal, sane person, the room is done. 🙂
Anyway, here’s the lamp without the shade.
We bought a bat and cut it down to the size we wanted. The bat’s about 16.5″. Then we drilled a hole through the center and added a lamp kit.
The base is just two pieces of scrap MDF glued together, then cut into the shape of home plate and painted white. Cute, right? Sometimes Chris has good ideas.
Here you can see we ran into some problems. The long drill bit that we used bent while it was in the middle of the bat and jumped out the side. It actually worked out fine though because it wasn’t in too bad of a spot and we were able to just use that for the cord. We did, however, lose the ability to have all the lettering on the bat on the front of the lamp.
I had that little problems solved in about 5 minutes. I just ran to the computer and used my favorite wax paper transfer technique to print out the words “All Star” in a fun, sporty font. Then I pressed it onto the lamp and we were all set!
If you follow me on Instagram, then you may have seen how last week I bought 87 different (slight exaggeration) lamp shades from Target and I was trying to decide which was best. A lot of you loved the chevron shade, and I did too, but in the end the grayish navy shade seemed like the best choice for what I was going for in here. Plus Kennedy said no to the chevron and she pretty much has veto power in decisions involving the room at this point. It’s her little brother, after all!
We’ve tried to make other lamps before and this was definitely our most successful attempt to date. What we learned is that you really need to focus on how tall the lamp will be in the end and compare that to the size of shade you’d like to use. I just measured the height of another lamp in the house that had the same size of shade that I had in mind for this project and made my lamp exactly that height. Worked like a charm!
So there we go. One more little detail of this room under our belts! We’re getting so close to being ready for the final before and after! Can’t wait for that!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.