Marbling is a bookbinding craft. Pigment is floated on a bath of thickened water, drawn into combs and feathers with a rake, and lifted onto a sheet of paper in a single pass. It went onto endpapers for four hundred years before anyone thought to wrap it around a lamp, and it is still done by hand because there is no way to do it any other way. The sheet takes the pattern once and never takes it the same way twice.

These are marbled in India on 100% recycled cotton paper and finished on brass plated steel frames with a spider fitting, so they sit on a standard American harp. Chiswick is a loose cornflower and slate swirl on cream, the quietest of the four and the easiest to place. Kelmscott is a combed feather in slate blue and ochre, warm enough to sit with brass and old wood. Caslon is a peacock comb in seaglass green, which is the color I am asked for most and almost never find well made. Doves is the softest, a blush, sage and antique gold feather that looks like an endpaper left in the light for a century.

Every shade is a 16 inch empire, 6.5 inches across the top and 11.7 inches high. Because the pattern is pulled by hand, the one that arrives will not match the photograph exactly, which is the point of buying a marbled shade rather than a printed one.

For a cordless lamp, the Poldina shade covers are marbled by the same method at a smaller scale. For the printed and block-printed shades, see printed and patterned lamp shades, and for solids, the silk and linen shades.