Details on the 158" shade

There's a lot of detail I'd like to share about the 158" shade featured in last Friday's post.

The fabric was railroaded- it wasn't perfectly symmetrical in both directions, but nearly, and the repeat was small in either case, so I thought it would be best to have no visible seams.  Instead, we seamed it horizontally and hid the seam under a fold.  Figuring out the logistics was trickier than I thought it would be!  Luckily I got it right, whew.  The repeat is just 4.5" so the folds are a little smaller and closer together than I usually plot for hobbled shades.

I did catch a break on marking the fabric for sewing the tape and rings.  I used a lovely double-wide cotton sateen from Hanes, and could just see through it enough to make the marks by pattern instead of having to measure.  THAT was a huge plus- it not only saved time, but also assured accuracy.  I took this photo of the first shade as pattern placement reference for the following two.

The Rollease Skyline clutch on a 1.5" tube provided a strong lift system.  After using this tube a lot recently for both clutch AND spring lift systems, I think I will now remember without having to look it up: screw eyes for clutch, NO screw eyes for spring.

Another thing I think I finally will remember without having to look it up: for reverse mount hobbled shades, DO NOT put the grommet through the tape!  I had to wiggle the tape free out of every grommet in order to make slight adjustments to the board line.  I also finally got smart while making the adjustments and instead of unstapling, I used a blunt instrument to nudge a bit of lining upward and stapled it to the back of the board.

Did you see what tool I'm using there?  It's our new Milwaukee cordless, battery-operated staple gun!  My hands are no longer able to operate an old-fashioned manual staple gun, and the shade was too far away for the compressor hose, so this new toy I mean tool came in very handy!

The tube, at 158", was too long to safely use without support.  Luckily Rollease has introduced a splice- the Easy-Link.  This allows the tube to be split in half and spliced, with the splice doing double duty as a support bracket.

For a fail-safe during transportation, we used cable tie mounts at each end of each tube, just in case the tube came out of the bracket.  It can't fall far, because it's all strung up to the shade, but it saved some annoyance when it DID happen and we needed to put it back together.  Please note: we snipped the cable ties loose once the shade was installed, because they would add resistance to the lift if they stayed in place.
There are two types of cable tie mounts: one is all in one piece; the other sticks on then you secure it with a screw- that's the one we wound up using.

Oh, and another thing.  If you read the previous post, you might remember that the soft cornices didn't quite fit in the corner, and I had to take them back to adjust the ends.  I made a piece of welting on "wings" with velcro, and velcroed it in between where the new ends met.  I forgot to take a photo of the welt with wings, sorry.

I wish I could say that the pattern flowed around the corner because of meticulous planning, but really it was serendipity that the pattern on the two ends created a near match.  Sometimes luck is better than skill!

It WAS skill, however, and not a bit of luck involved, that the pattern matched preciselty from the soft cornice to the shade!  And I'll gladly take full credit for THAT, as well as the perfect pleat-to-pattern :)

Keeping a big job organized

March was a busy month in our workroom.  Several big projects were due to be installed in a small time frame. It was critical that I work to maximum efficiency in order to meet my production goals.

The job featured in the last post consisted of eight shades of different sizes, and six required joining widths. 

Because so many other things were happening at the same time and space was limited, I couldn't cut and join all these widths at the outset because there was no room to store them neatly.
I inspected the fabric and tentatively marked the 81" cuts, allowing several inches above the board line.

One of my favorite free workroom tools is the big 4-5" diameter tubes that are used for shipping velvets and upholstery fabrics.  I made my 14 cut lengths, leaving them stacked on the table, and rolled 6 of them onto a large tube, individually, so they could be peeled off one at a time for fabrication.  Then I split one in half, for the 98" wide shade, and rolled that onto another large tube, along with the last two narrower cuts.  Every cut was labeled with blue tape.  The big tubes make rolling easy, so I save every one I get.

For the 5 shades that were about 65" wide, I trimmed the sides to the necessary width, and hung them over the fabric rack at the end of the table.  With blue tape I marked one of the center cut-offs at the board line, and kept it hanging in the back as a reference as I worked through the fabrication of the shades.

When I can, I use this method for joining widths- I don't know what it's called!- I fold 1/4" from the selvedge, align it with the other fabric cut, nudge it over, and top-stitch down the fold.  It takes practice, but when you get the hang of it, it's a neat, efficient width-joining technique.  I learned this about 30 years ago from a professional drapery sewer named Connie who continued working well into her 80s, and I've been practicing it ever since.  By the way, Connie did NOT need to press that 1/4" and she did NOT need pins!

The table grid and long straightedge made easy work of trimming the tops evenly.

Each shade was made by my standard fabrication method, with buckram and weight bar tube in the bottom.

I never, ever join widths of lining for shades anymore; I stock double-wide regular and napped sateen in white and pale ivory.  These shades were about 5" longer than my 60" wide table.  When it was time to shift the shade to finish the top, I first marked a line with disappearing pen, pinned, shifted, and used a quilter's rule to mark the finished length.  The shade was trimmed and staple-basted.

Once it was neatly folded and set aside, it was time to roll out the next cut length and start a new shade.
When they were all made, it was easy to put them through an assembly-line to finish, because we had already cut and covered the lumber, cut the weight bars and ribs, and assembled the Rollease clutches- for 60 shades.  All these components are marked and grouped by job.  The photos below are from a different large batch of shades, but it's representative of what we do before every high-volume fabrication effort.