Roman Shade made with an Ikea rug and cheap mini-blind

I have been dying to make a roman shade using a mini-blind.  Have you seen this idea?   You attach fabric to the front of a mini-blind to make a roman shade, genius I tell ya!  And I finally got to try it, and let me tell you, it was super easy.

I used an unconventional material for mine though, a decided to try a flat weave rug from Ikea instead of fabric.

I am not going to reinvent the wheel here, and do a step by step tutorial, because there are tons of tutorials on Pinterest , you can check out here.  I do have a couple of pictures I took of the processes.

First I laid out the mini blind and took out 90% of the vinyl slats by cutting out the ladder string.I ended up using 7 of the slats once I measured and spaced them apart.  Even though the length of the rug was much longer than I needed,  I didn’t want to cut the rug for fear of fraying.  So I used the whole length, which just gave me more folds, when it was pulled up. I glued the slats on to the rug using fabric glue.  And just to be safe, I also did  two hand stitches on each slat through the mini blind and the rug.  That extra step was time consuming, but because I was using a rug and not fabric, I wanted to be extra certain the rug would stay on the slats.Here is the roman shade done hanging over my chair in my office.  I put the stitches on the white vertical lines so that they wouldn’t be noticableAnd here is a picture my sister sent me with her cell phone of the finished roman shade hanging in her bathroom

Pretty sweet right?  I wish I had a better picture to show you but you get the idea.  I am so happy I decided to try this, now I want to make more!  The only draw back I would say about this method, is that the operating mechanism that you use to make it go up and down is on the backside of the shade.  But honestly it isn’t that big of a deal, just a tiny little inconvenience.  Overall, I would do this again in a heart beat.  It was super easy to do, and I bet even easier using fabric.  I can’t wait to find another excuse to make one.