Saturday, October 03, 2015

Persistence:

noun
  1. firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.

My latest project has required a great deal of perisitence.  I have been working on this project for over two weeks at this point and am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!  If it would have been a quilt, at least the progress pictures would have been great for blogging, unfortunately miles of ruffled kiwi colored fabric, or miles of ruffled blue fabric just were not inspiring to me (although I suppose my readers might have been interested...)  To tell you the truth I was so sick of this project that I didn't even want to talk about it!

 The green-yellow fabric is a lightweight velvet that is actually more green than this picture shows. It is so soft and is actually quite nice to work with.  The blue is a heavier woven cottton, almost like canvas.  I cut about 20 2 inch strips of the velvet, which were folded in half and then ruffled.  It took a lot of time, but made a lovely accent.
This is the picture from the fabric.com website.

 Then I had to do a lot of math work because I needed to make a total of 12 pleats for the bottom of the valances.  Each pleat was lined in the kiwi and the pleats were angled to show off the pretty accent.  The windows and trim were not exactly consistent in their measurements so a lot of math was done to figure out how far apart each pleat needed to be.
 Of course, I realized that I accidently reversed the order of the pleats on the piece with 7 of them.  I ended up taking out each of the pleats, and exchanging the backing fabric with the kiwi to get them in the right order.  The measurements of the windows are just enough different that each pleat is a slightly different measurement from the next!
 I then had to gather the blue cloth (sorry for the washed out pictures - it's a gorgeous sunny day out and it comes right in my window!) to the flap, then stitch 1 3/4 inches away for a casing.  Not easy, because there is a lining underneath to reinforce the casing.  This took a couple hours by itself.  For each of the two valances!
 Here is a better look at that pleat with the ruffled trim.  Pretty!
 For the finishing touch, I had to make a dozen 1 inch covered buttons to accent the pleats.  These are actually pretty fun to make, but made my fingers sore as the velvet is thick enough to make it a bit difficult to push the backs on.
 Velcro is added to the back of the top, which requires gathering at the top and 3/4 of an inch below that.  This was another several hours of painstaking stitch, then re-stitching because the backing got tucked in.  Or the lining.  Or both.  Lots of seam ripper usage on this project!
 This is how the casing looks.
 And where the velcro is attached.  The velcro attaches to a mounting board at the top of the wall.  The Valance then swings out about 9 inches at the bottom and is mounted with hardware to hold it out from the wall.  You can see the triangular end piece below.
The back of the finished Valance.  One Valance is about 100 inches across and the other is about 150.  A this point I have about 29 hours in on this project, (not counting the hours spent re-doing the error of reversing the pleats!) and probably another 2 or 3 left to do.  I sure don't know if I would want to make this again - but at least I know what to charge if I were to do so!

Persistence does pay off and is a good character trait - I am glad I am persistent, but wish I was quilting, instead!  I have several long term projects that need more work and I would love to be able to dedicate some of my sewing time to them soon.  I love the obstinant part of the definition - because it certainly describes me :)  Never give up - if you persevere you can finish whatever project you are working on!  Have a lovely weekend!


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