Retro Yellow!

Workrooms receive all sorts of fabrics for creating home furnishings, and it's difficult sometimes to imagine some fabrics in their eventual homes.  One thing you learn as a wholesale workroom: make no presuppositions, because context is everything!  Such was the case with this two-room project we fabricated for Crosstown Shade and Glass.

We were jolted by this brilliant yellow fabric, a Madcap Cottage print from Robert Allen, and couldn't imagine how it was going to look made up.  It was such a joy to work with these fresh colors and a thrill to see the final product installed.
Both of the treatments, above, were a little under 12' wide.  The swags were wider than a width of fabric, so the cuts were pieced, then aligned precisely on the table so we could stack cut.

The Parkhill Swag System makes swag-making a breeze.  I'm glad, however, that I had years of practice making swags without it, first with M'Fay patterns, and later drafting by hand using Ann Johnson's book "Anatomy of a Swag."  Those early experiences made it easier for me to improvise using the Parkhill.
Anyhow, using the Parkhill chart we set the template and marked the shape for cutting.

The beauty of the Parkhill is the finger cutouts which allow mounting with minimal bulk on the board.

Mounting the straight window was textbook, but mounting the bay swags was fiddly, requiring some improvisation.  For the swags overlapping the angle, I wanted all of the folds to stack on the "arms" of the bay which resulted in some excess fabric to disguise.   To achieve that I snuck in a 7th fold on each of those two swags in the angle.  

 In addition to the bay angles, we also had to find a way to trick the eye into believing that the two "arms" of the bay were the same size; in reality, the right arm is 2" longer.  I think we pulled it off.

 And, hey, if you've read this far, please accept my apology for the sparse posting so far this year- January was a crazy month.