While I was in the middle of our master bathroom’s mini-makeover about a month ago, I got this (what I thought was a) great idea about how I could easily make a custom roman shade to liven up the window in there without any sewing. Fast forward to one morning last week, when I got around to tackling that idea. All was going swimmingly and I took a ton of pictures to show you and then I hung it up the finished shade and, well, if there was a soundtrack to go with my life, the sound bite at that moment would go something like *womp womp*. Let me tell ya, it’s one thing when your plan fails halfway through the process and you can just ditch it for Plan B or just ditch it all together. But when you complete the whole process AND THEN at the very end, when you’re expecting a firework of good emotions, things don’t pan out, it’s heart-breaking (in the most superficial way possible, of course).
Le sigh.
But, there is a good ending at the end of this even though my sorry roman shade had to be jimmy-rigged. I’ll explain later.
Here’s that finished roman shade:
It looks real good in pictures but as we all know, pictures can lie in a social media world. #amiright #oramiright
The window in our master bathroom is frosted and our backyard is large and very private so there’s really no need for curtains or shades or anything like that except for aesthetic reasons. And I like aesthetics so I decided on a shade. After hunting around on some secondhand sites and online for a small, bamboo shade and coming up empty, I found
this little guy* on Amazon Warehouse. I was trying to find something under $10 and he rang in $3 over so not too bad but the magnetic feature was super cool, I thought, especially since this shade wouldn’t need to function. The magnetic feature assured there wouldn’t be any strings to hide so I was sold. Plus, I had further plans for it. Read on.
One way I like to add color and pattern to a space is in the window treatments. When you get tired of the current pattern you can swap them out pretty easily and somewhat affordably (especially if you’re talking sewing your own or using no-sew hem tape to make some). I wanted to add some fun to our bathroom and the magnetic shade wasn’t going to do that on it’s own. Nope. It needed a little help.
After a little bit of a search, I found
this fabric and knew it would be the perfect match to our new shade.
A little bit of hot glue later and BAM, pattern right where we needed it.
Let me go into the process of how I went from plain to patterned because the process is gold, and then I’ll dive into where it all went wrong and how you can take the successful route instead.