Life of a craft, travel, food, and photography loving engineer: diy

February 25, 2013

Canvas for Grandma

Standing in front of the 'You are my sunshine' canvas that I made for Grandma for her birthday. The cricut can do amazing things :)

October 26, 2012

No Mount, No Sew, Manual Roll Up Window Shades

So when I moved into my apartment in St. Joe, I loved that I had these huge windows and high ceilings. I quickly found out that the street lamps are left on every night and the blinds that were in the window were now exactly light blocking! I decided that I wanted to keep a little more light out and add some color since I can't paint. I went through quite a few ideas but settled on manual roll-up shades so that I didn't have to ask for anything to be mounted in the windows. They are just on tension rods.

I decided on one patterned window and two red ones.

I decided to use fusible interfacing to give the shades some stiffness along with some more darkening ability.

So first step was cutting everything to the window dimensions. I definitely remembered my measurements incorrectly when I was working on these at my parents house. Luckily, it ended up giving me the necessity of having a cute border on each shade.

Then, I had to iron everything together. The first time, I actually followed the interfacing directions and used a damp cloth but then slowly proceeded to get to the point where I just directly ironed on the fabric because it went so much quicker!

Next, I aligned the border and ribbon. This is what I did to fix the measurement mistake :) After I ironed the borders on, I just flipped and used fabric glue to secure the edges.

I knew I had originally seen a button tutorial on Pinterest but never thought I would use it. I bought the little kit from JoAnn and made what I consider to be completely easy and acceptable buttons. This was the only sewing portion of my project though, and I definitely stabbed my finger.

I used fabric glue again to stick a dowel rod in the bottom of the shade to give it some weight and then again to make a loop in the top to put my tension rods through.

These are the 3 mostly finished products without buttons yet.

I knew that I wanted some way of keeping the shades rolled up if I actually wanted light in my apartment, so that is where these strips and the buttons came into play. I just used my leftover fabric and cut them to a length that would wrap around the shade when it was mostly rolled up. I used the interfacing and fabric glue again. So simple! I did make slits on both ends of the strips and sew buttons back to back on the shades to make for easy moving.

So this is the final product! I love the pattern and colors. There is a nice strip of window at the top because I am not tall enough to shove the tension rods up that high, so I am pretty excited for Max to visit and fix them so I can unroll the bottom and block out the stupid streetlights!