No Sew Roman Shade from Mini Blinds

***UPDATE: I’ve received so many great questions about this project that I did a second post on no sew roman shade from a mini blind FAQs

You may have seen a few versions of this floating around blogland and Pinterest, and being so sewing challenged, I am all for anything involving fabric that is “no sew”. Give me a drill or a saw and I’m all set. Sewing machines? Who? What? How?

Supplies needed:

fabric
blinds
fabric glue
measuring tape
scissors

I had heard a rumor that Home Depot will custom cut blinds for free. It’s true, they do, only on certain brands. For this project, the goal was a cheap blind, and cheap blinds are a plenty there. You can customize the length of the blind yourself, so just find one that is as close to the size of your window as possible, ask them to cut it to the right width, and then you can shorten it to the right length when you do the roman shade.

Pop off the bottom caps, unknot the pull string, and set aside the bottom bar. You will put this back on later.

Cut away the ladder cord. DON’T cut the pull cord. That’s the one that raises and lowers the blind. It’s a thicker single cord. Only cut away the ladder cord.

Decide how many folds you want and how far apart you want the folds. This will determine how many slats you keep. We kept four slats and spaced them about 7 inches apart. Most of the tutorials I read did them about 7-9 inches apart, and I wanted ours to tuck up and not hang down much over the window, so I went with a shorter distance between slats.

Reattach the bottom bar.

Cut your fabric about 2 inches wider than your blinds.

Iron your fabric if needed, then fold over the sides and iron the hem. Make sure that after hemming that the fabric is 1/4 to 1/2 inch larger than your blinds. This is just to make sure your blinds don’t stick out the side of your fabric. Double check that your window opening is big enough for your fabric if you are doing an inside mount.

Run a thin line of fabric glue under the hem and run your fingers from the inside of the shade to the outside corners to smooth it out. Keep some damp paper towels on hand to wipe off excess glue. Add a little extra glue if needed and just keep pressing down and smoothing the hem until the entire hem is glued.

Now you’re ready to attach your fabric to the blind. Lay the fabric face down, set your blind on top, and glue the top bar to the fabric.

Use your tape measure to space each slat evenly apart and glue each with the convex side down. That’s the side that bumps out so that it will stick best to the fabric. Make sure not to get any glue on the pull cord and that the fabric is smooth after gluing. Glue the bottom bar down when you are done with the slats.

Let dry and then hang it back up.

Admire your handy work.

The shade works pretty well and is going to raise and lower as well as the blinds you purchased do. If you are going to use it heavily, I’d consider getting a higher quality blind that has a really good raising/lowering mechanism. The back isn’t finished, so you can see the blinds on the back of the fabric from the outside. This is mostly a decorative shade for us and we almost never close the shade on this particular window since it is in the back of the house. If I were doing this on the front of my house, I’d probably try and do some sort of liner that covers up the slats from behind.