Mock-ups, part 3: The Swags

Have you ever thought you knew exactly what you wanted, until you got it and then you knew it wasn't what you really wanted after all?  That's what happened to a very lovely client recently.

The new treatments

Sadly, she realized after she received her treatments- swags and jabots over a straight valance- that what she really wanted was full, droopy, substantial pole swags. 

The treatment we removed

Though this is what she ordered, as soon as it up she realized it was not what she wanted.  It was too cramped, too "Victorian-looking," too small in scale.  I returned to the house with the designer, and we browsed through books until we narrowed down what she was imagining for those windows.

I spent a lot of time sketching, drafting patterns, and creating mock-ups until we got the look she had been visualizing.  We returned with several samples to hold up so she could see the differences in size and fullness.

She wanted to see lots of pole and wall and loved the look of stacked swags with a minimum of overlap, and a long, skinny jabot that framed the window without being bulky.

Thanks to the mock-ups, we were able to achieve the look our client sought.
Thanks to Ann Johnson's books, I had the resource I needed to draft the patterns successfully.
And, thanks to the frustrating experience of sewing through the bulky stacked velvet folds, I came home and ordered a Parkhill Swag System- used!  Oh boy!  looking forward to my next swag job..... more on that when the Parkhill arrives..........