No-Sew Roman Shades

First things first, here is what you’ll need:

• Your fabric. I got mine from Tonic Living called “Outdoor – Soho, Robin”. It is outdoor fabric but it ended up being really easy to work with plus I figured it will hold up better in the sun.
• Tape Measurer
• Fabric scissors
• Fabric glue
• Blinds that fit your window. (I got these from Target for $3.99 a pop)

So the first thing I did was get my fabric ready to go. I cut out 2 1/2 inches more than my window which is 35 X 60 inches. So my fabric dimension to start was 37 1/2 X 62 1/2 inches.

Then I ironed over about an inch of my fabric to create the hem. Be careful to make sure your fabric will be wide enough to cover the blinds but narrow enough that it won’t bunch inside the window sill (if you are doing an inside mount).

Go ahead and glue the seams together after you have ironed all four edges.

Alright now that your fabric is ready to go, it’s time to whip out your blinds. First I took them out of the box and undid them so they looked like this.

Next cut the ladder cord from the blind. DO NOT CUT POOL CORD.

And then pop off those little caps at the bottom (set aside you will put them back on later) and untie the knot.

Then take all the slots off leaving how many you’ll need to make the folds in the roman shade. I kept 4 slots (plus the top and bottom bars) calculating that it will be a little more than 10 inches between each slot for my 60 inch blinds. Confused yet? It is recommended that you leave 7-9 inches between each slot, I left a little more because my window was so long. Oh in in the pic below it looks like I kept 5 slots but the one on the top is just connected to the top bar and sort of just hangs there so I left it alone.

Now it’s time to reconnect that bottom bar! Basically you have to measure each string so they are even to each other (so when you pull blinds up and down they aren’t lopsided) and equal to the length of the blinds. Then you tie a knot at the end, push it in the hole (that’s what she said) and reattach the plug at the bottom.

Time to attach your blinds to the fabric. First I evenly spread out the slots with my tape measurer… although looking at this pic, nothing is really level. Oops! I was more careful when I glued.

Grab your fabric glue and glue each piece to your blinds. I started with the top and bottom bars, let them dry for a bit then went back to glue the slots. Oh and be sure NOT to get any glue on the pull cord, this would ruin everything.

Let it dry and hang em up! Here it was the space looked like before:

And here is the after:

Here is the view walking out of my master bedroom!

There you have it. How to make inexpensive NO-SEW roman shades.

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