DIY Roman Shades

Ok.  Crafting with a newborn is sort of a bitter sweet experience.  It is really sweet because, as you know if you have had a newborn, they sleep ALL the time.  Apparently they sleep for about 20 hours out of the 24 hour period.  That is potentially a lot of time to get things done (though they don't tell you how tired you are going to be all the time, especially if you are breastfeeding and your body is in overdrive to be a milk machine).  The bitter part isn't really bitter, but the problem is if you get started on a big crafting project while baby is sleeping, baby will eventually wake up and you have to stop said project and go get elbow deep in dirty diapers and then feed them again!!

Well, that is what happened when I decided to make some roman shades for my kitchen window.  For almost a year now, my husband has complained bugged pestered (oh heck there isn't a nice word) me about my decorative curtains.  They are two panels that I got from Ikea, but I put them on 2 foot curtain rods so they would just frame the window.  Well, I haven't really noticed as much, but my darling husband doesn't like that the TV in the living room has a horrible glare from the window in the kitchen, and he can't fix it because of my *stupid* decorative curtains!  I wasn't going to get rid of my curtains because I love the way they look, so I started looking for a different way to fix the problem.

I started searching for some roman shades because that seemed like the most logical choice.  Do you know how expensive custom roman shades are?  I don't even want to talk about it.  Luckily we live in the land of technology so I went out in to the blog world to see if it was even possible to make it a DIY project.  Here are a few of the tutorials that I read through.  I didn't follow any one completely, but I learned a lot from reading different blogs and finding out which steps were going to work for my project.  Check out these blogs to see what the other ladies did, all of the projects turned out great!!

Beneath My Heart
Brown Paper Packages
Park House Love

A couple months back my mom and I were at target and I found some absolutely adorable place mats that I purchased to go on the kitchen table.  When I went to target to pick up my mini blinds for the project, I happened to walk past the clearance section and guess what I found?!  There were giant table cloths of the same fabric as my place mats on clearance for $8 each.  Okay, you can't find that much fabric in the fabric store for that price!!  I snatched up two of them and headed on home!!

The first roman shade took quite a while because I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing, and I had to allow for glue drying time and poopy diaper changing time.  However, it turned out awesome! I absolutely loved it.  But life happened and it was a couple of days (okay maybe more like a week) before I started on the second shade.  I measured and cut and got everything finished.  And then I hung my second shade up next to the first one.  Well.  You know that saying, "measure twice, cut once?"  That definitely applies to gluing mini blinds on fabric too.  Unfortunately the slats are about 1 inch off of each other.  That hardly matters when I have the blinds down.  Only a crafty person who is looking for it would notice.

 But when you pull the shades up.........

The shades on the right of the picture are the shades I finished first, and the ones on the left I finished last night.  I was very sad when I pulled them up and they have that cute little mess up.....see it?  Pretty awful, huh?  That is because of the inch difference in where I placed the mini blinds.  My sweet husband says they look fine, but I have a feeling I am going to be figuring out how to un-glue the blinds from my fabric and trying again.  I am seriously hoping that it doesn't ruin the fabric, because I can't get anymore!

Ever had a project turn out like this?


Frustrating!!!! Wish me luck!