I really wanted Roman shades for this room because of the abundance of windows. Blinds would have looked meh and traditional drapery wouldn’t have made sense with this setup. I wanted an easy way to enjoy the sunshine by day and then definitively block it for bedtime so our son wouldn’t awaken us at 6 a.m. daily. (It turns out that we love our children more when they don’t jump onto our sleeping bodies at the crack of dawn. Go figure.)

I looked into purchasing Roman shades and nearly passed away when I priced them out for nine individual windows. It was ridiculously expensive. So my mom offered to make them.

We chose this herringbone pattern from the Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow collection.

She looked up instructions online and set to work. She’s a handy lady and quite the seamstress, but I think she would describe this as one of the most frustrating home improvement projects she has ever undertaken, and has vowed to never attempt a Roman shade again. (For that reason, I am not posting a how-to because she was dissatisfied with the directions she found online and ended up improvising in a way that only befits an experienced sewer.) That said, they look amazing and totally professional and she saved us a ton of money. In return, we vow to never put her in a nursing home.

Here’s the end result, in both open and closed positions.

You can also see the small fan we installed over the bed area. I needed a small-ish fixture, but this one was even teenier than I realized. I was feeling unsure about it until my son saw it and said, “Oh, I love the propeller light!” Done. Now I just pretend that was my plan all along.