No-Sew, Faux Roman Shades

If you stop by this site regularly, you can probably tell I'm on a window kick...with this fabric! It's all been in my kitchen. It was way overdue for a window treatment makeover. 

I ADORE roman shades, but, well, you know me and sewing machines. Um, no. So, I've been tickled to run across several tutorials for roman shades that don't involve sewing. My absolute favorite is from Richella at Imparting Grace. Although mine's not 100% like hers {I decided to keep my blinds up for privacy reasons}, hers worked the absolute best for me. And her tutorial was wonderful.

Again with the curtains hung on door knobs...I liked it for not too long at all. 

I'm so happy with my new {faux} shades!

For this project, I used my fabric and three tension rods per window (so I had nine in all). I would go ahead and get the nicer tension rods (bypass the $2 ones). The cheaper ones will sag in the middle under the weight of the fabric.

I used the same method from my tutorial for cafe curtains to "hem" my fabric. And again, be warned...I don't sew...I do some insane things to fabric to hem it (no judging, please...we all want/deserve cute window treatments. I just go about creating mine a little differently.). You'll need to hem your two sides and the bottom. The top can be left raw (I even left the selvage on mine because I'm lazy like that).

For these shades, I used the valance boards from the blinds that were hanging there to measure my widths. You do have to be precise as possible on your measurements width-wise. You'll want to conceal certain hardware that's used and to do that, your fabric has to come exactly to the edges of your windows. But, you don't want any over hang, either...that would be a mess to have to deal with.

This tutorial I'm showing is designed to keep your blinds in use with the shades. There's a couple of reasons I'm keeping these up. The biggest is that when we bought this house five years ago, the realtor told us that the previous owners spent quite a fortune to have these custom blinds installed throughout the house. They're fine for blinds...kind of plain jane. Honestly, for what they spent (the realtor told us the dollar amount and we were like "Wha?!?"), I would've preferred hard wood floors or granite counters (seriously, who spends that kind of money for blinds?). But, even though I'm sounding like a whiney brat, I am grateful for these (amazing?) blinds. Kind of. So, I felt the need to keep them. And, until I also install panels over the shades, we do prefer them for the privacy. When I get the panels up, I'm having one heck of a blind sell on Craigslist. Cha-Ching. I digress.

See that green arrow up there? It's pointing to the valance on the blinds that you'll need to remove. I'm sure there's a proper tool for removing these (and their annoying little clips that hold them in place). However, my method involved yanking and pulling and tugging and yelling at them until they popped off. Very professional.

You will use the first of your three tension rods at the very top of the window, on top of the blind mechanism. Mine fit so snuggly...I was worried it wouldn't work. But, they've stayed up there and the first shade's been in place for three days now.

Drape your fabric over the rod (you may have to remove it and play with it to get it in place). You can see my unfinished part there...it won't show in the end. It tucks itself into the top fold...it can't even be seen from the outside. My fabric hung down about three quarters of the window's length from top to bottom. You don't need it to hang down over the entire window.

Install your other two tension rods. I kept the working assembly on the wrong side so I could adjust as needed....it's covered completely by fabric so that didn't matter. It's your choice how far you'd like to space your rods apart...it depends on how wide you like your folds apart from each other.

You'll pull your fabric on top of each rod to create your folds. You will have to play with them to get them just right. They were much easier to work with on my side windows. The big window in the middle was a bit difficult to work on. I finally gave up and waited on my husband to come home from work....it was definitely a two person job for such a wide window.

And they match those cafe curtains over by my kitchen sink that I showed you last week.

I'm so excited about them!! Again, I'm planning to do floor-to-ceiling panels (maybe from drop cloths?) between them and on the sides...hopefully hanging on one of those nifty bay window rods. But, for now, I kind of want to enjoy them by themselves.









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