DIY No Sew Roman Shade

I hope you all had a good weekend - weekends have taken on a new form since the little guy showed up - gone are the weekends of epic errands/running around and projects, and now we have leisurely, relaxing, weekends with walks, playing, and cooing. Kind of cool :)

I do have another DIY project from the nursery to feature - my no sew Roman shade!

The roman shade was meant to be a simple DIY no sew project…I started it before Owen was born and my mom had to finish it! It was still pretty much no sew, but took a while to figure out the placement of the pleats and how to maneuvre the whole blind.  I wanted the shade to be functional to offer light control, but a lot of the tutorials I found involved mini blinds on the back and to be honest it was all just a bit too involved. I finally found what I wanted andused this Thrifty Décor Chick tutorial as our main guide. 

Since this window is right next to our neighbour’s window, I wanted to keep the slat blinds for privacy while still letting light in. This meant that I couldn't mount the roman shade within the casing, which would have been easy peasy. Instead we added a small block of wood to the top of the window frame and used a tension rod between that and the wall to hold the roman shade.

I wanted the shade to be blackout to darken the room for Owen’s naps and (hopefully) early bedtime when he’s a bit older. I didn't have the patience to wade through a bunch of fabric looking for the right price so I bought a white table cloth at Homesense, and some navy ribbon from Fabricland to get the look I wanted. I cut the fabric to size and added blackout lining with hemming tape. This was the part that I did...

Then the challenge of how to make the shade WORK. The tutorial uses eye hooks for ribbon, but I wanted everything on the blind itself. To allow the blind to be raised and lowered easily, my mom sewed 1 button on each side of the back of the blind, and then added ribbon (ribbon lengths get longer as you go down the blind) at three points to be our gathers.

 

When the ribbons are hooked over the button, you get the casual roman shade pleats, and it makes it easy to put the shade up and down. And finally, my mom added the lengths of ribbon using heming tape to adhere to the shade.

I’m really happy with how it turned out, but I definitely couldn’t have done it on my own (preggo brain / new mom brain did not make it an easy project! Aren't mom's the best??). Stay tuned for a full nursery reveal later this week...