The other remake-

Yesterday's post was supposed to be about two remakes in one home, but I only showed the living room.
The second was a really pretty balloon shade in the upstairs sitting room.  Liz from Paris Interiors asked if we could turn it into something more tailored and modern.
My job was to take this apart and make it into a flat roman with trim around all 4 sides.

Which we did!  Liz was completely over the moon at the outcome.

The original shade was unlined; we added a semi-sheer poly-cotton lining from Ado.  Because the bottom hem was covered with the tape, we machine stitched it for security, but not before first hand-basting it in place.  For a weight bar, we used a white Dofix hem bar which also helped keep the bottom line straight.  We prepared the shade then turned it right side up to apply the trim.

Now you can imagine that I was nervous about a geometric patterned flat braid around 4 sides with 4 corners to miter! 

I carefully laid out all the trim, centering the motif on each side, to make sure I could match the pattern, and hand-basted each corner before sewing the diagonal seams.

Trimming these seams was the scariest part!  Sewers have to have a strong risk-taking streak, or else we'd never do steps like this.

After snipping the outer corners, the cut edges were tucked away and bound with strong upholstery thread.

Dofix Bortenfix tape was used to adhere the trim to the shade.  The shade was first hand-basted at the board line to ensure that the lining and face would stay together.  Here the excess at the top is being trimmed away, and the shade is ready for re-mounting.

I will confess that the pattern was not totally perfect on all four corners.  It was difficult to manipulate the tape into the right size, with perfect pattern matching, and without distortion.  This corner would not cooperate no matter what I tried, so I pulled out my embroidery and darning skills and used color-matched thread to disguise the mis-match.  Up close, as in this photo, you can see my handiwork, but in the room- it's completely undetectable!

 

Another tidbit: the creases from the center pleat of the original balloon style was very difficult to remove.  Luckily the fabric responded positively to a ton of steam and Crease-Away.  Nevertheless I couldn't get the creases out of the top 10" or so.  In the workroom it was really obvious, with the overhead light; but I decided to just trust that the whole shade was so awesome that the creases wouldn't be noticed.  And guess what- even I could not see them once the shade was in the window.