The Swag Holder

Or as we call it – the thing that holds the window curtain string. You know, that hardware you wrap the string around when you want to pull your window shade up (and you want it to stay up)? Apparently the technical term for it is a “swag holder.”

Who knew?

Since we’re in the final stages of making our DIY roman shades for the kitchen windows, one of the items we needed to purchase was a swag holder.

Problem is, I went to two local fabric stores and Home Depot and all of the swag holders looked something like this:

Or, this:

Kinda ugly right? I’m pretty sure I said to the guy working in the hardware aisle at Home Depot, “Don’t you have anything cuter?”

And I’m pretty sure he looked at me like I was nuts.

But whatever – here’s my rationale: you go to the trouble of either making or paying for window curtains, why wouldn’t you want to make sure the window hardware is in line with the look you’re trying to achieve?

So we made our own DIY swag holders. Why the heck not? We used two long screws and we bought two decorative drawer pulls that we found in the knob aisle at Home Depot.

Tommy used JB Weld to glue the screw head to the bottom of the drawer pull, and we set them out to harden for about 4 hours.

Then they hardened to look something like this:

And Tommy screwed them into the window frame to look something like this:

And here ya go, a quick preview of our DIY swag holder with one of our window shades that Tommy has already hung:

We think it was $6 well spent. Well, better than the alternative atleast.

More pictures of the DIY roman shade project to come…..