Top welt on shades

Here are two shades with top welt.  These are for two different rooms in the same house and both shades are being mounted inside, so the welt is pushed sort of forward so it's not on top of the board and in the way. 
Sometimes welt is really hard to put on shades, but both of these fabrics were easy to work with and made beautiful welting.  I used a somewhat thicker cord than usual to make welting that looks about 3/8". 
The pink print welting was cut on the lengthwise grain in order to center the circles.  The plaid welt was cut on the bias, centering the small squares in the plaid.  For both I made the welt first, with fusible interfacing, and then stapled it to the board.  For a skinny welt sometimes I'll just fold and staple, all in one step. 

Cute welt- AND pink beads!

Hanging in workroom overnight to train folds.

This shade is on the table ready for packing.  It's about the same size as the pink print shade.

Hybrid shade completed

A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture about this shade.
The client didn't want long tails and we discussed various ways to control the tail length.  I got a lot of good suggestions from my CHF Forum friends.  In the end, the decorator chose to have the sides tapered to reduce the volume in the tails.

The rings are 16" from the sides so we tapered in 12" so the inside of the tail drops only 4".

In this mock-up, the left side shows the tails before tapering; the right side shows the tails pinned up.

These shades are going in very tall windows facing a busy street, and though the shade drops to 68", the client is always going to keep them at about 45" long.  The bottom row of medallions are placed quite low but in context they will be closer to eye level.

That Koos Window Again

The Koos window on Madison Ave continues to inspire me.

The last thing my iPhone saw before it hit the pavement.

Top tack variation and faux fur

Our contributions to this "bonus" room are the sheer curtains, which were shown a few weeks ago in the process of being French seamed, and the faux fur and woven zebra pillows.

Because of this bouncy sheer and the very flexible clear buckram, these top tacks are a variation on our regular top tack style.  They needed another tack in the center at the bottom of the buckram, to keep the fabric from blousing out.  The tops of the pleats needed to be sewn all the way across to keep the buckram from slipping down in the back. 

Faux fur was flying while these were being sewn.  I think I breathed in as much as I eventually vacuumed up.  Amazingly, I managed to get zippers into these, and close them! 

The black curtains

The black curtains for Sephora Soho were a great success!  Here they are in this photo from Retrogurl, performing dramatically as the backdrop for Gwen Stefani who was there for the Harajuku Lovers Fragrance promotion  on Friday, New York City's "Fashion's Night Out."  

Hanging 35 widths of rod pocket drapery to cover a 48' wall is not an easy task, but our decorator friend devised a clever and simple solution and made it look easy.

Experimenting

When we aren't sure how to make something, we do mock-ups.  Usually we make them out of scrap fabric, but here is a mock-up out of the actual product, a sort of balloon-London hybrid.
Originally we mocked this up to see about trim placement, but in the process we also worked out a way to shorten up the tails.
The client does not like the tails to be longer than the shades.  Tail length is just a numbers thing, it's a product of the size of the return, the size of the side section, and the depth of the pleat.  In this case that added up to quite a long tail, as you can see on the left side.
We pinned this shade together and attached the rings, then experimented by pinning a sharp taper on the right side to get the tail length we wanted.
Decorator and client are happy with the results, so now to finish this one and make two more!
If I don't forget, I'll take pictures of the layout as we make them, and the final shades.

Another opera balloon shade

It's flat when fully lowered, and pulls up dramatically, magically.  I left it hanging in the workroom for the decorator's twins, four and three quarters years old by their reckoning, to see when they accompanied their mom to pick it up.  They were enthralled by the shade.  And I was enthralled by them.  I wish I'd taken a video of them raising it!
See how the pattern laid out?  The blue flowers are arranged nearly symmetrically.  That was the purest luck!  The board is 65" and I had 2 widths of fabric to work with.  There were no choices to be made about how to lay out the pattern- it could only be how it was.  Luckily the eye-catching blue is the most perfectly placed.

You've been thinking, Deb's been awfully lazy lately.  Au contraire- I've been forgetting to photograph work before it leaves the studio!  And I haven't had the chance to attend installations in order to photograph work on-site.  Nevertheless, I do have a few tidbits.

Great colors!

And there were two of these.

More great color, in dupioni silk for top-tack interlined draperies.

Color on the menu still on a lumbar pillow.

This may not look like much on hangers in my messy studio, but here hang thirty-four panels, each 134" long, for the backdrop for a product promotional event at Sephora in Soho this Friday for Fashion's Night Out- the city-wide Fashion Week kick-off.