The living room curtains are done!!! YAY!!!

Oh Lord, the curtains. I know we have only been in our house since April 20th but the curtains have been the vain of my existence. The lovely curtains we were blessed with from the previous owners weren’t awful per se because the cornice boards they left were great it was just the fabric that was hideous. And the curtains were pretty much see through which was great for light but not so great for privacy. Here they are in all their previous owner glory.

See the cornice? It has an awesome shape to it and great crown molding that I wanted to reuse. And see the curtain? A bit too see through for me. I’m a girl that likes her privacy and not her goofy English neighbor peeking in. {He never peeked that I know of but either way, I like my privacy mkay?}

So I found this great fabric at Hobby Lobby that has an iridescent sheen to it with the colors of, green, copper, and kind of a blue grey color. It’s gorgeous and Griff likes it too! Score! Check it out. And bonus, last night I was on the couch admiring my handy work and I noticed that the fabric was the same fabric that we used on the tables at our wedding, except the wedding fabric was black but it was the same material and both fabrics had the raised diamond pattern that gives it so much texture. I love it!

So to begin I took down the cornice boards and man were they heavy! I ripped the gross, dirty fabric right off. I’m not sure how one gets something that resembles spaghetti sauce way up on a cornice board but somehow it happened. Eeeeew!

Once I had all the fabric ripped off I realized I could reuse the batting that was underneath. Good thing because I forgot to buy batting and I was not going back to the store for the fifth time. {I might have become distracted while I was there and forgot some things, whatev.}

I began with measuring the cornice and discovered that my fabric was not wide enough.

First problem. No worries. I can handle this. The fabric did come a little over the sides so I stapled the fabric around the edges so you wouldn’t be able to see the white batting.

So I put my thinking cap on, looked around in my craft closet and came to a solution. I found some heavy duty felt and thought I could wrap the fabric around the edges so I could make a clean line where the fabric would meet at the edges. So I cut strips that were the same size as the sides of the cornice and went to work.

I took some fabric glue and glued the fabric to the felt and then used my electric staple gun to staple the fabric on backwards so when I flipped the fabric back over it would be the right side.

Then because I had to use one hand to hold the fabric and one hand to staple I wasn’t able to apply as much pressure as I needed to get the staples to go all the way into the wood. So I had to hammer the staples in. But I would have done this anyway because I wanted to make sure the staples went all the way through.

So I did this on both sides. When I was finished with that then I cut the white liner fabric to cover the wood in the back. Since you will be able to see a little of the cornice board from the window outside I wanted a clean look. Ya know, as professional as a non professional can be. :)

So I had a DOH! moment and I forgot to take pictures of me reapplying the crown molding. My bad. I was just so excited to have these suckers done it slipped my mind. But here is the finished product! What do ya think? I freakin’ love it and so does Griff!! I had to take pictures at night because the light that comes in through the windows is crazy bright and you wouldn’t be able to see anything.