Some Shade Short Stories

A few shade projects from this week:
Three shades like this one were made from a really nice quality sheet.  They're French blackout lined, with a cute pleated grosgrain trim sewn into the bottom.  Next week I will write more about these, because I pulled out all the tricks from my own "Efficient Shade Making" class to fabricate these relatively quickly to meet an unexpected deadline.  I have to say, I was pretty impressed by my efficiency!  And they were beautiful.

There were three shades made from this gorgeous embroidery, which of course we pleated to pattern.  Like the fabric you'll see two stories down from here, this fabric had to be pieced in an unconventional way, due to the odd pattern layout.  Each shade has a seam on the right side- a sliver cut from the far left selvedge and added to the right side, to get a centered pattern.  It was the only way to make these shades with a centered motif.

Five shades were retro-fitted as double-sided shades because the homeowner didn't want to see the lift cords.  A little valance was made to go over the lift mechanism.

And one double London shade, which was an enormous amount of work to lay out the pattern in an attractive way.  As with many high-end prints, there was not an obvious central vertical motif to play off of, probably because the fabric was designed to be used as long curtain panels, and not narrow shade sections.  This shade is composed of two widths of fabric, sliced and diced and re-assembled, with the seams hidden in all kinds of crazy places, to get a balanced pattern layout for this application.