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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

My Roman Shade Cheat

I have been wanting to replace the bamboo roman shade that covers my front door for some time, but of course didn't want to spend a fortune doing so.  Recently I had picked up some upholstery fabric on sale and had intended to make my own.

I started with this huge piece of fabric:


I pulled down my old shade to inspect how exactly it worked and see if I could salvage the hardware for my new shade when the light bulb went off....why not just cover the old one?  (I wish I had taken a picture of the shade before, but you can get an idea of it from the picture below)

I hemmed the fabric leaving excess to wrap around the back of the blind (I needed it to look neat because you would see it from the outside).  

I installed some grommets at the top to allow the cording to go through the cover and used a very strong spray adhesive to glue the cover onto front of the old shade.  I did this from top to bottom, a little bit at a time, while the shade was hanging, carefully evening out any bubbles.

I finished the edges by top stitching the fabric to the bamboo using a heavy gauge needle (surprisingly I didn't break a needle doing this) I probably didn't need to do this part, but I wanted to secure the fabric in place and I like the look of a sewn seam.

I finished the shade off by covering the top piece that hangs down and hides the hardware....once again, using spray adhesive.

And a few hours later.....walla!  A brand new shade!  The best part is I didn't have to do a ton of measuring, install dowels, hardware, etc.

How cool is that?  I may have "cheated", but it saved me a whole lot of time and I am extremely happy with the results. 

2 comments:

  1. Brilliant! I like the fabric, too.

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  2. Awesome, I need to do this to my living room shades, you can totally see through at night when the lights are on. I'm wondering if I can add the fabric to the backside since the bamboo works great with our decor and is still in good shape.

    What spray adhesive did you use and what type of fabric?

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