Our house is quite close to another house and my reading room/meditation space (work in progress) looks right into their windows. To fix that, I made some DIY window coverings from:

• Fabric I used to use as diffusion in my light kit
• Corn Starch Syrup (2 TBSP corn starch heartily mixed into  1/4 cup cold water, and then boil 2 cups hot water and mix together).

This all came to about maybe 3 bucks worth of materials to cover my two big windows. Significantly better than the $32 a window that the commercial stuff is, and it feels very zen in here now.

 

Process

You can find a lot more information about how to do this by googling DIY Fabric Window Cling, but here are the sources I used:

• Manhattan Nest
• This American House
• Apartment Therapy
• How About Orange – Cool way to use it as Wall Decals

The process is legit simple to do.

• Cut fabric to size (It’s cool if it is about 1/4 to 1/2 inch over size, you can trim up with a box cutter after drying.).
• Iron Fabric.
• Make the mixture.
  • Take 2 Tablespoons Corn Starch and dissolve/mix into 1/4 cup cold water. Stir it up good.
  • Boil 2 cups water.
  • Pour the 2 cups boiling water into the corn starch water, mix.
  • Let it cool down a bit, ready to go.
• Grab an plastic box lid and lay the fabric on top of it (to catch the corn starch.
• Take a paintbrush and paint it onto the back (window side) of the fabric. Liberally apply it.
• Press fabric onto the window and then work the bubbles out from the center to the edges.
• Use a flat edge (putty knife or plastic card) to work the bubbles out.
• If it overhands the window onto the moulding, that’s fine.
• Let dry overnight, use a boxcutter at the edges to clean up overhanging fabric.

Cleanup is super simple, with the cornstarch just melting away under hot water and a rag. If you need to remove these, wipe with hot water and soap and it will clean up nicely. The darker/heavier the fabric, the less light it will let through and you could do the process with patterned paper or other materials.

Here a photo showing the final windows, the difference in , and my cat…