I May, You May, We All Love A Pelmet!

Full disclosure, I have never even heard of a "pelmet" until a couple days ago.  But lately, I've been trying to spruce up our bedroom a bit.  I whipped up some curtains from this gorgeous rosey silver velvet fabric (photos to come), but our windows still looked a little sparse.  So I thought, what about those box things you can put at the top? I wonder how much those cost. Its A LOT guys....wow is it a lot.  So I had my newest project, to make two matching window box things that looked like they were legit but were, in fact, SUPER cheap (it is Christmas time after all!).  I had some fabric left over from my aforementioned curtains so that one was easy, I also had some batting left over from our old couch. Long story, needless to say when you have a 20lb king charles spaniel who likes to perch on the back of the couch it takes its toll so we attempted to wrap our two back cushions with batting to tighten things up, which worked, for a while.  We've since upgraded to the Ektorp sofa from Ikea which is fantastic.

But back to the project at hand.  So I had my fabric, I had my batting, all I needed now was a pattern and a "skeleton" as a base for the pelmets.  The pattern came easy enough, I just googled pelmets until I found a pattern I liked.  Then I measured the length of my window and divided by two.  I decided to create a pattern for just half of the window and then flip it so they would be mirror images of each other.  Then I measured out the distance on some dollar store craft paper and sketched a quick grid, dividing it into quarters length and width wise so I could have reference points to sketch my pattern.

I cut it out and decided on foam board for my skeleton.  Now I'm not a huge fan of foam board simply because of the clean-up, but for this project it really was the best option to keep the dressing lightweight and low cost.  So I made my first purchase of 4 pieces (a left and right piece for two windows) of foam board that, with my swanky 25% off purchase coupon I scored at Michael's for about $8.  Done and done!  So next was to tape and trace the foam board.

So once I cut the pattern out of the boards and then started searching for what sort of wings I could cut out that would actually go against the wall and give it depth. What I ended up using was the insides of the remaining board from the curve cut out (the portion inside the dotted lines in photo above).  Then I started "upholstering".  Even typing that just now made me laugh a little because what it involved was this-

Yeahhhhh.  So just pull that stuff taught and tape it down with some masking tape.  I would have preferred duct tape but ours went mysteriously missing.  So duct tape is for sure the best option but, as you can see, you can make do with just about any kind of tape as we're going to smooth it with the fabric we're adding in a minute. Here's a look with finished batting- don't you dare laugh...

I can't emphasize enough how unattractive looking your batting layer can be, as long as it has a smooth surface you're golden!  And finally, like adding icing to a cake, I added my fabric pulling it taught and securing with a staple gun being careful to make neat corners and keep everything super tight.

After I finished with the fabric I went back and just cut the extra off along the edges past the staples so nothing would show once it was hung. And here we are ladies and gents, our final product pre-hanging (as well as aforementioned spaniel...)  

I'll post more photos once its up and in its permanent home, but in the mean time i'll be looking for a good way to hang it.  Anyone out there have any tips or tricks?!!