Foyer Fresh and Grande!

My mother gets some fabulous deals on fabrics...silk and high end designer. Often $3/yard! I am so blessed to work with such great fabrics and to have a mother with a good eye--she sends them to me from Colorado! Since early summer I have been working on finishing out and updating curtains in my home. Here is the first project - hopefully the scariest one, done! It came out just grande!

As you can see, this is quite the project! My husband and daughter  installing the mounting boards--after we did a "catch the rosette without squashing it" game... you should try it!

In designing these curtains, I used the golden mean principle. The sheers go at least 2/3 down the upper window and the long panels are tied off at 2/3 the entire length. Each panel is 5 yards. I found a great tip from a professional site, which I am sorry to say I can't find again to link, that said if you can avoid it, don't hem the sides of the long panels. I have had dealt many times with puckering on long panels and I was eager to avoid that nasty problem on this project. So, I used my friend's serger (life saver!) and my youngest daughter turned the side seams under 3/4" and ironed them down.

The second trick I found was to make sure you hang them far enough off the wall as the longer the fabric, the more it will "lean into the wall". I had my husband make 5" deep boards (mine were 20" long). He mounted them with two L brackets with a 1" gap at the wall for me to put the fabric into for the side of the curtain. It worked and the fabric hangs like a dream. 

I was also very concerned about being able to clean them, but knew that would be a tough one. I designed the panels with box pleats at the top and sewed them down.  I then sewed on sticky velcro...yes, sewed on the sticky--the last thing I wanted was to have my panels pealing off the mounting board! My husband (you're the man, honey!) put the velcro on the mounting boards and stapled them on to be sure they didn't peel off. Then he climbed the ladder with the panels and hung them up. Woohoo!

My back using the staple gun on the sheers... try getting the slick fabric just where you want it and then grabbing a staple gun, and trying to put enough pressure on it to staple...eeek!

 The sheer piece was another story. It just wasn't going to be coming down. We used two large nails to mount the "knot" of sheer fabric on. Then I made the rosette out of the draping fabric. I hot glued the back with extra fabric so that it would keep its shape which was handy in the tossing game. :D Anyway, that was when I had to just get up there and try to make the two sides work. Usually I am up and down and up and down -from side to side-working the fabric until I like the result. This was just way to high for that and too difficult to move the big ladder around the chandelier...  It was once or nothing in my mind. With my two middle girls on the landing giving somewhat vague directions (sorry, girls - but it was high up there and scary:!) we worked through. Add the tassles I purchased at Hancock for about $5 each and I can definitely live with it!

Thank you, honey, for being willing to climb that ladder for me so many times! I love the result. 

Do you have a scary decorating story?