Blinds for the Kitchen

At night time and in the morning before the sun rises you feel really exposed in our kitchen. There’s nothing like standing at the counter making breakfast in your pjs with crazy hair when your neighbour comes out to empty his compost into the bin.

Roman shades are nice, so I decided to sew some. Unfortunately I dislike following a pattern, so quickly veered off on my own path with mixed results.

I didn’t want horizontal stitching to show on the front of the blind as it would have detracted from the graphic pattern. After watching a tutorial on youtube, I was amazed by the power of jewel glue and glued the wood battens to the fabric instead of sewing them. It worked well and no glue seeped through the fabric. The ribbon with little rings got attached to the lining and I turned the whole thing inside out.

Somewhere around this time the cat tried to help and broke one of the wooden battens glued to the blind. More glue to the rescue and you couldn’t even tell. Luckily I then tested them and realised that because only the front fabric and not the lining was attached to the batons, the lining ballooned out when the front folded nicely. It is hard to describe but basically it looked really bad. More of the magical glue to the rescue; I glued the baton to the lining as well and was good to go.

Now they are sitting in the dining room, waiting to be hung. Why are they waiting? Well to be installed they need strips of wood at the top which I still need to cut and paint white to match the trim.

And now we know: there are some really rad sewing videos from the eighties on youtube; mauve and floral wallpaper everywhere!