Thursday, July 12, 2012

Pinterest Challenge

What forced me to actually get into gear and start writing in this blog that I had already secured my name with  a month ago is all in thanks to Sherry of Young House Love. I have admired their home re-designs for a few years now and long-anticipated my own home to fix up and now I have it! But, what really pushed me to get the ball rolling was the Pinterest Challenge created by her and Katie Bower. I have been on Pinterest for a while now and am constantly pinning things that I want to do to my home. For the most part, I have made many recipes but nothing for the house.

My husband and I are finicky when it comes to our privacy, and while our new neighbors are nice, we do not like the thought of people being able to see into our house at night with our lights on and us being unable to see outside due to the dark. So for a month we would close our hurricane shutters on our porch to give us privacy. Dorks? Paranoid? The new weirdos on the block? Yup, that would be us. So after pinning these simple no-sew roman shades from Involving Color and wanting to face the challenge I grabbed a yard of fabric on sale at JoAnn's for $6, some mini blinds from Wal-Mart for $10, a tape measurer, scissors, and my hot glue gun and tackle the beast.
 After my son went to bed for the night I brought out the mini vinyl blinds and laid it on the floor.
 As mentioned in the original posting, I removed the white plugs from the bottom of the blinds on the thick plastic piece
 Next I cut away the three "ladders" of the blinds. Here is where I got nervous, hoping I cut the right part, leaving only the thick string that attaches to the shade adjuster.
 Earlier in the day I ironed the fabric and cut it to size.
 I then hot glued the corners of the fabric to make a nice hem (*Note, I only had a hot glue gun, and while it currently holds, it is important to actually use fabric glue and in time the hot glue will no longer hold up. I will be adjusting these shades as soon as I get the fabric glue.
 I cut off all but 5 of the vinyl shades, then glued them 8" apart with the exception of the 6th blind at the bottom that was about 2.5" from the one above it.
 I then screwed in the hardware and tested out the handywork.
 Here we have the shades open to see if the fabric folded in the proper "roman" form.
 The blinds even work great halfway opened/closed.
I was relatively happy with the product. Beside the glue, I would change placing the pull cords in the front of the fabric instead of behind, along with not cutting them so short because now I need to climb half-way on the counter to open the shades up. It does it's purpose though and I no longer need to feel like a dweeb for closing the hurricane shutters for privacy.

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