Window Coverings For A Private Zen Room

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:

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…