I live in a very small house, only about 1000 square feet, and it only has a half basement, so space is at a premium. Two years ago, we redid the “spare” room. As it really was more of an office, and the small bed that was in there was shoved up against a wall and practically unusable, we decided to remove it and set the room up as an office with two workstations and some bookshelves. We emptied the room, stripped wallpaper, painted and moved back in. I promptly went out and searched for fabric for a Roman shade for the room’s sole window. Maybe you all have a similar problem, but I seem to do the shopping part well, but sometimes lack the follow through. Oh well.
That fabric and trim ended up getting placed in a pile with other fabrics and I lost sight of it. Whereas I knew that the window in the room was bare aside from a blackout blind, it wasn’t enough to prompt me to action. During the recent “cleaning up of the basement” activities, the fabric surfaced again. Amazingly, I still like the fabric I bought and decided 2 years was long enough to go with no window treatments, so I dug in. I have never made a Roman shade before, but assumed it would be easy and fast. I was sort of wrong on both accounts. It was “fairly” easy, but I had to make a bunch of modifications. The pattern said to make Roman shades only for windows up to 48” across. Mine was 61” but I blazed ahead. I needed to buy wooden dowels to insert in the back so that the shade lifted correctly. I came to find out that my local stores only carried dowels up to 48”. Maybe that was part of the reason behind the instructions in the pattern. I ended up finding some very thin aluminum slats that were not too heavy that I was able to use instead.
I choose fabric that was embroidered and had big puffy flower heads on it. Sewing across them my stitching line tended to want to veer off, so while I was only sewing straight lines, they took a long time. I had hardware problems, had to make a mounting board, get it hung, etc. So the “simple” project I had in my head took a lot longer than I had anticipated. If I ever have need for another one, it should go a lot faster. Here is a picture I took after getting it hung last night. The picture doesn’t do it justice and I am actually happy with the results.
Tags: roman shade