4-In-1 Roller Shade

My room has a west-facing window with a beautiful view of our garden. I would like to have a semi-transparent curtain that lets in some of the light, so that it both provides privacy and allows us to see outside. Additionally, since the window faces west, the sun shines into our eyes the whole afternoon, so it would be nice to have a black-out screen that blocks out all light. 

But we only have one window. How could we possibly meet both of these requirements?

Double roller shades, which are basically two roller shades glued together, could solve this problem. However, it would be nice to have a curtain with more than two settings.

We aimed to create a roller shade that could easily switch between multiple different designs to meet multiple different needs. As a bonus, we could make some of the designs more decorative.

Normal roller shades only have one roller tube at the top. The shades coil around the tube when you let them up or down. What if we made a roller shade with two roller tubes - one at the top and one at the bottom? Then we could design a longer piece of fabric containing multiple shade designs and connect it to both tubes. If we looped the same bead chain around both curtain tubes, pulling the bead chain would allow us to cycle between all of the designs (kind of like a conveyor belt.)

We noted that with normal roller shades, you can roll the shades up so that they don't block any light. This is not possible when there is two roller shades, as this would disconnect the long curtain from one of the roller tubes. This means that we must include a fully transparent shade in our design.

The roller shade we bought has a 6-foot-tall curtain. With 2 roller-shades, this system can hold up to 12 feet of curtain. We want to cover a 3-foot-tall window, so we can design 4 different shade designs. We already want one semi-transparent privacy shade, one blackout shade, and one transparent shade, leaving us one shade that we can freely design.

Material

• Blackout Roller Shade x 2: the width of the shade should match the window you would like to cover. We used two roller shades of size 20” Wx72”H to showcase the design in one of our doors with windows.
• Peel & Stick Fabric Fuse Adhesive roll 5/8”. We need flexible and stretchy fabric adhesive to maintain the elasticity of the fabric and other materials.
• Window Vinyl 3D-stained glass pattern 17.5” Wx78.7” H. Please feel free to use other patterns.
• Clear PVC Vinyl
• Spray paint-Metallic Silver and Black

Tools:

• Craft knife.
• Pliers

The first panel is a semi-transparent privacy shade. This will be the topmost design in our shade

Remove the bar on the bottom of both roller shades. This bar normally stops the curtain from rolling up into the roller tube, but here it will just obstruct our roller shade mechanism.

Measure and mark a 3-foot-long section of the current starting from the top bar.

Mark out 2-inch margins from the top, left, and right. Cut out the inside rectangle.

Use fabric fuse tape to secure the 3D stained glass vinyl pattern to the roller shade as shown.  Use masking tape to secure the vinyl's position before you start to glue, removing the masking tape as you go.

The next two panels will be a blackout shade and our own designer shade. We decided to make our designer shade a blackout curtain with a design cut into it. Hopefully, when the sun shines into the window, it will project a design onto the ground! We chose a silhouette of the Seattle skyline for our background. 

Start by marking off a 3-foot section of roller shade directly after the semi-transparent privacy section. Spray paint the side that will face inside the room black and the outside side silver.

Do the same with a 3-foot-long section of the second roller shade.

This is the fun part: adding your personal favorite art or let your imagination go wild!

We sketched a starry Seattle skyline on the silver side as shown and then cut it out with a craft knife. A stencil comes in handy if you have one with interesting shapes. Make sure to cut off any excess fabric threads that may appear when you cut the roller shade. 

This panel is supposed to offer a fully unobstructed view of the outside. However, cutting out a big hole in the curtain makes it lose structure making it more vulnerable to damage and perhaps causing it to snap under the tension of the operation of the roller shade. We tried cutting out 6 smaller holes instead, but this still caused the curtain to not roll properly onto the roller tubes and jam the mechanism. So, we glued on colored translucent vinyl sheets as shown.

Connect the two shades with fabric fusion tape.

Install the brackets for the top and bottom roller tubes by the manufacturer's instructions. Make sure to align them accurately.

Once the brackets are secured in place, install the roller tubes and roller shades.

Now, we need to adjust the length of the chain. The chain is made up of small hollow metal balls. Measure the length of the chain that you need and cut it to the proper length. Carefully cut open one ball at one end of the chain (leaving out the "wire" end as shown). At the other end, pry open the ball a bit so the "wire" end from the other can squeeze in. Close the opening on the ball with pliers, securing the wire.

[1] Sagging

Since I manually put two shades together to get a long shade, the part where the two shades meet is heavier than the rest of the shade. When the shade is rolled around the bottom roller tube, the shade may suddenly sag instead of rolling tightly around the bottom roller tube.

A factory-made long shade would not have this joint problem.

[2] Difficulty of Creation

When we started our feasibility research, we were worried about if the second rolling bar would make the roller shade more difficult to make or operate. It turns out that with proper installation, the mechanism for the double rolling shade is pretty easy to make and use. The top and bottom roller tubes must to be carefully aligned. 

Additionally, the height of the shade and height of the window need to match well. We were lucky to have 12 feet of curtain and a 3-foot-tall window. If you had, for example, 11 feet of curtain and a 3-foot-tall window, you would likely end up wasting 2 feet of curtain.

The final difficulty in creating this curtain is the chain adjustment, which could also be made easier by producing it in a factory.

[3] "Transparent" Shade

When we were designing the transparent window design, we were not able to make a completely unobstructed shade due to its structural instability. We decided to use colored vinyl to cover up the holes, but completely transparent vinyl would also work.

We could solve this problem by making the bottom bar retractable instead of fixed on the wall, allowing the roller shade system to conceal shades inside of it when transparency is desired. The top bar would be fixed onto the wall as normal. However, this would also make it much harder to operate the roller shade.

I hope you've enjoyed my 4-in-1 roller shade!