I tried to share a few of the changes I've made in the masterbedroom, but Willie stole the show. That's the honest truth. I went in there to snap a few pictures, and suddenly I was taking pictures of him. Just him.
If you did happent to get a glimpse of what was going on in the backgound, you were probably thinking to yourself, hmph, nothing special there. And you'd be right. I don't have any show stopping before and after pictures. I've just made a few small changes over several months. That goes completely against my typical method. I'm a vicitm of the trading spaces mindset. You know, you get the urge to redecorate and want it done now, but I've had to change that way of thinking.
I've been pinning ideas, mulling over the feel I want the room to have, and implementing changes gradually. One of those changes was the window treatements. My color palate is going to be blue, white and some light sand/linen tones.
The room is void of architectural details. The ceilings are not high, there is no crown molding. A pretty boring box of a room. To add some interest I stencilled the wall behind the bed.
It gave the room so much interest. Stenciling gives you so much bang for your buck. Even without a headboard, the room looks so much better.
The stencil I used is the Anna Damask stencil from Cutting Edge Stencils. I'll talk more about that later this week.
Today I wanted to share what I did with the windows, hence the post title. Sometimes I get sidetracked.
Pay no attention to the ginormous used to be in the bathroom mirror leaning against the wall. (Unless you happen to need a ginormous mirror, then look closely at it and email me. It's yours if you want it and live close by.) Also ignore the comforter draped futon at the end of the bed. Like I said, no stunning after photos here, it's a work in progress.
Where was I? Oh yea, the windows. The curtains are simple white panels from Target. I doubled them up because they aren't very wide and look a bit wimpy with just two per window. So for these two windows there are actually six panels. Good thing they were on clearance when I decided to double up.
What I'm here to talk about are the bamboo shades. I love the look of bamboo shades, but they provide no privacy and let in lots of light. Not really great for a bedroom. Especially when someone who sleeps here sometimes works nights. If you've ever worked nights and tried to sleep during the day, you know light blockage is essential. Even a sliver of light peaking through can seem like a spotlight. I'm telling you, we go to great lengths to block light. Not only did we have room darkening roller shades, but over that I made from black-out lining a panel that is removable and covers the whole window. It has grommets and velcro and completely covers the window and blocks all light.
But again, that's not what I'm here to talk about. Those roman shades. Remember I said I had room darkening roller blinds? Well, my friend Kelli recently hung roman shades in her daughter's room in a front facing window. She wanted to keep visual uniformity from the outside of the house, so she left the white roler shades she had and hung the bamboo shade outside the roller shade. You can't see the roller shade from inside the room and you can't see the bamboo shade from outside the house. Sneaky and smart huh?
Well, my widows aren't deep enough for that to work so I had to come up with a different privacy/light blocking solution. I googled how to line roman shades and found this tutorial. Woohoo. So, I proceeded to do just that. I decided to reuse the roller shades for the lining.
I opened the bamboo shade out completely, laid it on the living room floor, placed the shade over top and followed the tutorial. I was quite pleased with myself. It's easy-peasy. Just glue the liner to the shade at the top and cut slits for the metal rings, oh wait, back up. You have to untie the strings from the rings first and pull those out of the way. After that you glue the liner to the top and cut slits for the rings. Then run the string back through the rings and you're done. Be sure to follow Jane's tut at the Borrowed Abode. She goes into more details and has good pictures.
All was good. It was easy. I hung my lined bamboo shades and was quite pleased with myself. It should be noted I did this at night. It was dark when I hung the newly lined shades.
I woke up to the strangest sight.
In the photo it's dots of light. In real life it was as if rays of sunshine had pierced the shades and were invading the room.
Well, that had to be remedied ASAP.
Think, think, think...what to do. I pulled the shades back down and tried to think of what I could do. I thought to myself, I need something like those stickers that reinforce the holes in notebook paper.
So, I got myself some white silhouette vinyl from the craft room, which by the way looks like a war zone right now, but that's a post for another day. I used a circle punch to cut circles from the vinyl then punched a hole in the center with a regular hole punch.
Then I cut a slit in my little vinyl donut and covered the slit in the liner.
As usual, being supervised every step of the way by the foreman.
And his less hands paws snout-on sidekick.
Some of the slits were larger and required a little extra vinyl to completely cover over, but once it was all on, the shades went back up and all was good. No more darkness piercing beams of light shooting through my shades.
*This photo was taken before I doubled up the curtains.
