Roman shades progress; and gifted kids when they grow up.

It's next weekend, and the first Roman shade is done, including the installation. Here's the proof: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

I spent a lot of time stressing over the installation process: how to position the pulleys and cord lock device, whether I should have bought a wider mounting board, where to stick the darn thing on the wall, how hard it would be to mount it with the angle brackets with the shade attached, and on and on. Turned out it was not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. The shade is actually pretty light, weight-wise, so I was able to duck under it to get to the angle brackets. And I had cut the fabric so that screwing it to the top of the window frame was the perfect length, which bypassed my concerns about finding studs in the wall to screw into and/or installing wall anchors.

Getting the old shade down was also pretty easy. My old shades aren't mounted the normal way; instead there's a tab that clips them into the hanging bracket. I shoved a screwdriver into a slot in the tab and pushed it toward the window to release the clip, and poof, down came the blind.

In short, the process was easier than I expected it to be. And now that I know what I'm doing, more or less, the bedroom shade is going much faster. I forgot to get a photo of the office window before I took the old blind down, but here's a "before" shot of the bedroom window. I guess that 35 years ago, when the rooms were all varying shades of tan, these beige shades looked great. Not so much anymore. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

This window is large enough that I'm having to lay out the new shade on the bed to pin it. Tigs, of course, is helping. 

"Is comfy, Mama. What you mean, is going on the window?"
Lynne Cantwell 2026

This afternoon, I sewed on all the rings, attached the weight rod, and sewed the velcro to the top. Next step is stringing it all up to the to-be-assembled header board. The cords and hanging hardware may have to wait 'til next Saturday, but we'll see how the week goes.

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I really miss Jo-Ann Fabrics. Wikipedia says it began as a single fabric store in Cleveland in 1943, eventually growing to a national chain. But its fortunes rose and fell over the years with the popularity of sewing as a craft, and toward the end, it was diversifying its merchandise line to encompass other crafts and home decor items. Eventually, the whole thing shut down last year when the company couldn't find a buyer. Wikipedia says that Michaels bought the company's intellectual property and private labels. But with the exception of an expanded fabric department, I don't see much evidence of that, at least at our Santa Fe Michaels. And when I say "expanded", I mean their fabric inventory is maybe 15 percent of what Jo-Ann carried.

Multiple times during this process, I thought about how easy it would have been to gather everything I needed with a single trip to Jo-Ann: "Oh, I need thread to match the blue fabric; guess that's a trip to Michaels now. Oh, I need sew-on velcro by the yard; guess I'm buying multiple precut packs from Michaels instead. Oh, I need pulleys and a cord lock for each window; I bet Jo-Ann would have carried them -- they carried upholstery fabrics and notions -- but it looks like my choices now are either Amazon or random places on the internet I've never done business with before."

I realize I'm part of the problem. I quit sewing clothing decades ago, when fabric prices rose to the point where it was cheaper to buy ready-made clothing than make my own, despite the lure of wearing a one-of-a-kind garment created by my own hands. But sometimes, damn it, you want to avoid the overpriced, mass-produced stuff like "custom" Roman blinds and make something really custom. Small, independent fabric stores still exist, but it seems like most of them cater to quilters, with maybe some clothing fabrics on the side. That's not helpful for the kinds of things I'm interested in sewing these days.

I'll be done with this project in another week or so, and then I'm sure my sewing machine will go back to gathering dust in the closet. It's just a shame, that's all.

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If you're only here for the Roman shade saga, you can stop here. The rest is about smart kids when they grow up.

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There's an article in New Scientist this week about giftedness and how gifted kids turn out as adults. Alas, you have to subscribe to read the whole thing; I read it as part of my Apple News subscription (and btw, if you have an iPhone, Apple News is a terrific news aggregator and worth the monthly subscription fee). 

Kids who are labeled gifted have probably heard the derisive term, "early ripe, early rot". I sure did (from my brother, among others). But this article talks about studies that have tracked intellectually gifted kids into adulthood. The conclusion? 

Far from growing into troubled adults, many gifted individuals appear to flourish later in life. Long-term studies suggest they are more likely than average to achieve professional success and, contrary to popular stereotypes, often enjoy better mental health. Scientists are also starting to understand what makes gifted brains so exceptional, finding that they are better integrated and can process information more efficiently..."

And then it goes into the current debate over whether giftedness is just another form of neurodiversity, which I've already bitched about on this blog. Thankfully, for me at least, the authors of this article have found people to refute that argument:

Yet neurodivergence tends to describe neurodevelopmental conditions, which can create functional problems in everyday life, such as inattention, emotional dysregulation or hyperactivity. That doesn't seem to be the case for gifted children. "It is simply on the higher end in a spectrum of human intelligence," says Mimi Wellisch, a psychologist based in Australia who has published on gifted children extensively... Problems with behaviour "are unlikely to be a byproduct of giftedness," she says.

As for gifted-kids-as-adults, a 2020 study headed by David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, looked at the outcomes for 50-year-olds who were identified as mathematically gifted as kids, finding them to have a greater sense of well-being than non-gifted folks. In 2025, another team headed by Lubinski talked with 50-year-old former gifted kids, and "around half reported experiencing boredom and frustration in mixed-ability classes." And in terms of outcomes, Lubinski found in 2013, when comparing people who skipped a grade with those who didn't, 27 percent of kids who had skipped a grade later earned a Ph.D., compared with 15 percent of kids who hadn't. 

Lubinski says that based on his findings, the current fashion to remove educational supports specifically aimed at gifted kids in the name of treating everybody the same (so as to not make gifted kids feel pressured to achieve) is unfair, and could even be considered a form of prejudice. 

Which is pretty much what I said in my blog post last year.

The article also touches on complaints about the cultural problems regarding IQ tests and other methods being developed to identify gifted individuals, but this post has already gone on long enough. If you have any interest in the topic of giftedness, I recommend tracking down this article. It's a good one. And not just because it quotes researchers who agree with me.

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These moments of long-winded blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who doesn't have a Ph.D. but might get one someday. Who knows?