Car window shade

Here’s a quick and easy sunshade you can make for your car windows. It’s a great sun blocker when you have babies or children in the back seat.

Of course, we must recommend you use caution when driving with one of these.  Please use common sense. If you don’t feel you can see well enough, you could always just use it to keep the car cooler and then take it off while driving. This works really well for me in the hot months to keep my kiddo’s car seat cooler.

Supplies

Pattern

Take rough measurements of your window. I made my shade 10″x20.5″, including 1/2 inch seam allowances. If you have a large vehicle, like an SUV, you will probably go bigger.

Cut two pieces of fabric (the same or different fabrics) and one piece of batting. I decided later in the process to round my corners, as shown below, but if you make a pattern piece, you can round them on the pattern.

Process

Fuse or baste the batting to one piece of fabric.

Use a small bowl or lid to round the corners if you didn’t do so on the pattern (see note above).

Sew piping around one piece of fabric using your piping foot (or a zipper foot if you don’t have one, but I don’t even find the two comparable for this job). Join the ends of the piping using this tutorial.

On the other piece, baste small loops of elastic or ribbon. Mine were 1.5″, but in hindsight, I would have liked them to be either smaller or less stretchy.

With right-sides together, and using your piping foot still, sew the two pieces together, leaving a hole for turning. Then turn and press. Turn the seam allowance of the hole in when you press.

Switch back to your regular presser foot and stitch close to the piping to close the hole. Then simply hang from your suction cups.

Other views