How to Make a Relaxed Roman Shade

To help with planning this project, we used the relaxed Roman Shade calculator in the Sailrite^® Fabric Calculator. This tool will help you plan how much fabric to order, plot out where the lift rings will be installed on your shade and even show you a rendering of how to cut your fabric.

We suggest using a mid-weight home décor fabric for this project. You want to look for a fabric that has enough body to hold the pleats but not something too heavy that won’t pleat nicely or that will be visually too heavy for the room. We chose Sunbrella^® Accord Koi Upholstery Fabric for our shade. Then, we lined our decorative fabric with Blackout Drapery Lining Fabric. You can add a blackout lining like this, a regular drapery lining or skip this step completely, depending on your preference.

When your shade is complete, you’ll likely need to help train the fabric to pleat and fold in the way you’d like it to rest. Fixing the pleats is called “dressing” the shade. Because relaxed Roman Shades don’t use rods to force the fabric to fold, you’ll need to help the shade fold the first time you raise it. Then let it rest in place for a day or two so the fabric can form a memory of the pleats. Because of its relaxed style, these shades are often only raised to their highest position or completely lowered. If you’d prefer your shade to have more flexibility, you can add a Cord Lock (#104468, #104857), which allows your shade to be raised and lowered to varying heights. We didn’t use a Cord Lock in our video; we chose to cleat the shade at a fixed position instead.