Come to my window

Once upon a time I bought a light filtering roller shade for my daughter's room. It was cheap. It was ugly. But it was functional. Her room gets full on afternoon sun and that doesn't bode well for nap time. Fast forward to today, Springtime. It's a beautiful, balmy 70 degrees out and it's time to open the windows and air out the house. However, the cheap and ugly roller shade does not want to roll up. It must have retired sometime during the winter. There's old, wintertime air hanging stagnant in her room and I need open windows!

I am anti-mini blind so my deep desire to remedy this problem is to go to the drapery store, look through fabric swatches and spend tons of money on a custom made roman shade. However, the money tree is not in bloom so that's out of the question. We live in a pretty old house and that means the windows are odd sizes so a shade off the rack at JC Penney's or Lowes is out of the question as well. So I did what you do when you need ideas and inspiration. . .I Googled! And I found this!! Oh how I love my fellow crafty bloggers! (And here is someone else that used her idea as well. Loving the fabric she used!) Who knew it could be so affordable and easy to make your own roman shade?!

I'm not going to give you a detailed tutorial because of the links I shared above but I will share some of the things I did.

I didn't want to spend the money on an expensive piece of fabric because I wasn't sure this would turn out as professional as I hoped so I found a nice, thick pink twill on sale. I estimated that I needed a yard so I got a yard and a half just to be safe.

Fabric - $4
Blinds - $10
Fabric Glue - $5

Did you do the math? Under $20!!

(My daughter was thrilled that I didn't need the wand so she was more than happy to make use of it. We all have welts on our legs now but she had a good time and that's what matters.)

I started with adjusting the blinds. My advice is to measure, measure, measure! My window is only 34 inches long and the blinds were 64 inches so I spread the blinds out and measured. I put the glue bottle down to mark where I would stop removing slats.

.

I am a pro at removing the extra slats because when we bought our house, every freakin' window had mini blinds on them with about 4 feet of extra blinds at the bottom because the people that sold us the house were too lazy to fix them! But I digress....
The toughest part was prying off those little plastic buttons on the bottom piece.

Once I removed the extra slats, I put the bottom piece back on and made sure it was even. I then decided where I would want the folds of my shade. I wanted to be sure I didn't remove the slats I wanted to keep so I cut chunks out of the ones that were going to be removed.

I used the scissors to carefully removed the slats between my "fold slats." CAREFULLY! You don't want to cut the pull cord!

The blinds are the hardest part! Now it's on to the easy part...the gluing of the fabric. I found that large paper clips helped me out with holding down the fold as I glued.

Once I had everything glued down I thought I'd add a little somethin' so I pulled out some ribbon I had for some project or another that has long been forgotten. I lined the bottom with it.

And now the unveiling.....

I love how it turned out! And I'm even more thrilled with the cost of it all!

It's not 100% done. I am going to cut the roller shade and mount that onto the back of the new roman shade for room darkening. I'm still deciding about the valance. I'm even considering bribing my husband to put some wider (and whiter!) trim around the window, but for now I'm just happy that I can pull up the shade and let some fresh air in!

Happy Friday!