From 'Just' Curtains to Window Treatments

by Erin

We recently painted our staircase up to the second floor.  The Stair Room, as we call it, was shaping up nicely but needed one last addition. . . window treatments.  I started here:

Phase 1: Stair Room curtains

This beautiful ikat fabric came from The Needle Shop and really adds some much needed pizzazz to the Stair Room.  I really like panel curtains because I can easily open (and keep open) my curtains like this:

cafe curtains 

You can really fling them open in a dramatic fashion.

They are also impossibly easy to make because you basically just hem, iron, pin, and sew some straight(ish) lines.  I decided to hang my rod higher than the window since that is what Apartment Therapy tells me to do.  I would have like to have tried to gone higher, but I didn't have enough fabric.

So there we are, curtains.

Somehow this wasn't enough for me.

If the curtains were closed the stairway was too dark and if they were open "they don't offer the privacy we wanted," says the people walking upstairs from the bathroom in their towels.

Luckily I had signed up for the roman shade class at The Needle Shop as an end of the school year gift to myself.  So the day after my class (which was awesome. . . as always).  I got straight to work on my own roman shade for this very room.

Behold!

Curtains with roman shades

The whiteness of this beautiful Robert Kaufman fabric from Selvedge Studio, a great fabric store in Missoula, Montana, now lets in the light but adds the privacy factor.

The Stair Room - chandelier and all

The roman shade has dowels evenly placed on the back of the fabric and as you pull up the shade folds up into itself.  Making for a very clean and functional shade. 

casings for dowels - Robert Kaufman fabric was lined with muslin

Pulley mechanism

partially folded shade 

tie off

For as fancy as this shade looks, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, though I wouldn't have wanted to take this project on without the class.  Allison of The Needle Shop really did a nice job of explaining the finer points to me.  It took some precision and patience, which is good for me since I have a lacking in both of those qualities.   

Now these two can keep their windowsill, interspecies love private from the rest of the household members.