Adventures Of An Overactive Mind: Roman Shades: Hemming and Adding Rings

Hemming:

I have found the most important step in hemming is pressing. If you don't have an iron and ironing board, buy one. When you press a hem, you know it is going to keep it's shape as you sew. I have tried to skip this step, and the results weren't pretty.

Pressing:

Preheat your iron to the appropriate setting for your fabric. Lay your fabric out on your ironing board, right side down and fold your hem over at the end, using a ruler to check the width. If you have added 2" to each side for your hem, fold the entire 2" over. Press the measured area with your iron. Don't try to eyeball this step, you'll most likely end up with uneven hems, which really show once you hang your shades. Just continue down the edge of your fabric, measuring and then pressing.

Once you have completed pressing over your full 2" you will want to let the fabric cool so that the press can set it. After it is cooled you will want to unfold the press, and then fold the edge of the fabric in to just about the crease. If you fold it too tight it won't want to lay nicely when you fold the whole thing in again. Then again press this fold all the way along your fabric. Fold the hem all the way closed, press one more time and pin. You should now have a nice neat hem that is ready to sew.

Sewing:

Sewing your hems with a machine is going to be your quickest and most accurate route to go, but if you hand sew your hem you can almost completely hide your stitches. In this case I will show how I machine stitched my hems, at a later date I will add a post and link it here showing you how to hand sew a hem. When machine sewing a hem you'll want to stay as close as possible to the fold that is on the inside of the shade, and make sure to stitch your bottom hem last, and leave the ends open so that you can slide in the dowel when you add your fabric to the hardware. The size of the stitch you use is completely up to you. I used my longest straight stitch setting on my machine so as to match the stitching that was already on the shades as well as possible. I probably would have used it anyway because my fabric is a bit heavier and may have puckered if I had used too small or too tight of a stitch.

Adding The Rings:

First you need to decide how far apart you want your rings to be. If you space them out every 8", you will have 4" wide folds of fabric. For both my kitchen and dinning room shades I went with 8" spacing. For your first section up from the bottom you are going to measure up 1/2 of you spacing plus one inch.

Fold your shade with the wrong side out, measuring up your distance from the bottom (in my case 5") and press the fold with an iron. Fold the shade with the wrong side out again and measure your distance between folds (8" for me) and press again. Continue like this until you get near the top.

For your last section you will probably have some other amount of fabric left than your measurement you have been using. Don't worry. I had about 5" left on my kitchen shade and it makes a nice little ballooning when drawn up all the way, and with my dinning room shades I had about 11", the extra 3" is taken up for the most part in wrapping around the top of the board and hanging in front of it. I wouldn't add one more fold unless you will have at least 5" of fabric above the last fold.

Once you have all of your folds pressed you can measure in from the edge of the shade the same distance you have the screw eyes from the edge of the board and mark the spot with a pin, and sew your rings on. As far as I know there is no way other than hand sewing to attach the individual rings. However, you can purchase rings pre-sewn on a strip of fabric that you can sew on with sewing machine using a zipper presser foot. There are two downsides to the pre-sewn strips. First, you can't chose how far apart you want your rings to be. Second, it costs allot more than individual rings.