Lampshade maker and designer Rosi de Ruig has spent the last decade proving that a lampshade can be so much more than an afterthought. Working from her studio in West London, she designs and hand-makes shades from papers sourced as far afield as Jaipur and Japan, for clients that include interior designers Nicola Harding, Rita Konig and Anna Haines. Now, in her first Create Academy course, The Art of Paper Lampshade Making, she's teaching her complete process, from choosing paper to finishing with a trim.
From her kitchen table to her studio
Rosie didn’t set out to become one of the UK’s most recognised lampshade makers. After moving into her Victorian house in Shepherd's Bush with her husband and three young children, she went looking for lampshades she actually liked, and came up short. So she decided to make her own, working at the kitchen table in the evenings, once the children were in bed.
It was Nicola Harding, a friend and neighbour at the time, who saw what Rosi was making and asked for a couple of shades for a client's project. That first commission gave Rosi the confidence to turn this into more than just a hobby squeezed in around family life. Word spread. The bedroom filled with paper and packing materials until, in 2015, she made the leap to a dedicated studio.
More than ten years on, her lampshades sit in homes across the UK, the US and beyond. Her own house has been featured in House & Garden, and her lampshades have become highly sought-after — now something of a decorating staple for anyone wanting to bring colour, pattern and personality into their home.
How do you become a Lampshade Designer?
There's no formal training route into lampshade making, which is part of what makes Rosi's story so interesting. She learned through trial and error, spending endless hours at the kitchen table, testing papers, refining her technique, and figuring out what makes a shade sit well on a frame and what makes a colour combination work. Her design skills have been honed by years of collaborating with pattern designers, marbling artists and papermakers, and by making thousands of shades for homes she'll never see and clients who trust her eye completely.
Rosi also understands lighting as part of a wider decorating story, not a finishing touch. "I've always seen lighting as a way into decorating from the outside in," she explains, "a low-commitment, high-impact place to begin." Rosi generously shares these secrets of the craft, design principles, and technical knowledge in her Create Academy course,
Why you should make your own lampshades
Paper has been used to soften and diffuse light for close to two thousand years, from the lanterns of ancient China to the shoji screens of Japan and Isamu Noguchi's sculptural pendant shades, which lit up British living rooms by the thousand in the 1970s. There is something about paper, translated into light, that no other material quite achieves.
For Rosi, the appeal of making your own is more personal than historical. A lampshade is a small, forgiving way to bring in colour or pattern you might not want to risk on a sofa or a wall. Get it wrong, and you can move it to another room, or start again with a fresh sheet of paper. Get it right, and you've made something that no one else owns.
There's also the making itself. "The concentration lampshade making demands is exactly what makes it so calming," says Rosi. "You can't do much else with your hands while gathering paper onto a frame, and that enforced focus gives your mind permission to step away from everything else going on in your day."
What you'll learn in Rosi’s course
Across the course, Rosi guides you through her complete process for three lampshade sizes and fittings, including:
- Her approach to using lighting as a gentle way to begin decorating a room
- How to choose and source papers, and what to look for in weight, colour and pattern
- An introduction to shade shapes, fittings, bulbs and flex
- Making your own trims, and why she never buys them ready-made
- A step-by-step lampshade for a table or floor lamp
- Preparing a painted striped trim for a wall light
- How to seamlessly cover a large lampshade
- A tour of Rosi's own home, and the lighting choices behind it
"I believe anyone, with the right materials and a little bit of time, can make a lampshade they'll be proud of," Rosi says.