Shade Glitch

The other night we were stringing three reverse mounted flat Romans, with Rollease clutches.

The first two went fine, then the third one refused to lift more than about 15".

We spent an hour trying everything we could think of. First I meticulously re-strung according to the hallowed Rollease stringing principles I reviewed at the Rollease seminar last month with Geremie Giancola. Everything was perfect and it still stopped after raising only 15".

We wound up changing out virtually everything- clutch, brackets, fiberglass rod, bead lift chain- we unstrung and re-strung about 8 times, we measured to the millimeter making sure the fiberglass was straight, the board not warped or curved, on and on. Finally we changed the last possible thing (or so we thought), and the shade still stopped after 15". I was really and truly at my wits' end. We had nothing else to try, nothing else to change.

This is the wicked little knot

My fried brain had just barely enough juice left to think, "maybe there's a knot in the cord." Ta-da! that's what it was! A little knot in the cord preventing it from passing through the bracket. I was hysterical with relief! dancing around the studio, cackling like a wild witch.

Then we went and got Chinese food for a very late dinner.

Obviously, we had not changed literally everything!..... not the actual string.

I'm still trying to figure out how the knot got there.

It's awfully difficult to hang these reverse mount shades once the valance is on, unless you have another pair of hands, and I was by myself in the studio when I attached the valances.  So this is the best I could do for photographing these shades.

Happily the horizontal stripe was even and true, so it was pretty easy lining up these three shades, which are to be hung side-by-side in a bay window.  I laid out all three crossways down the table and made them all at once to keep them consistent.  

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