I've had experience making pelmets before. I've covered an existing wooden pelmet with new fabric and I've made a new one using foam board and both turned out well (so well they were still attached to the windows when we sold our house). Edit - the two photos below are professional property photos used to sell our house - all other photos are mine (and you can tell!).
 |
| covered wooden pelmet - Ikea fabric (ps my craft room has never been this neat before or since this photo) |
 |
| the foam board pelmet also covered with Ikea fabric |
The idea of using cardboard boxes, rather than wood or foam board really appealed to me because:
- I have plenty on hand after moving house recently
- I love to use recycled materials in my crafting when ever possible
- no $$ outlay for foam board - winning!
Now a couple of things to be aware of about me before we start; I'm an imperfect crafter/maker, I mostly eyeball measurements (rather than actually measuring), I tend to rush ahead and then have to go back, undo and make alterations and I can be extremely impatient which often leads to lots of "it'll do" moments.
I do have fun though and most things I attempt turn out ok in the end but if you are a perfectionist you may want to look away now.
What I used (all materials came from my stash)
- cardboard boxes - enough to fit the length and depth of window
- wadding
- fabric to cover the cardboard/wadding
- fabric trim
- jewellery wire
- cutting knife & scissors
- packing tape
- staple gun
- ruler & measuring tape
- iron
I started by folding and cutting up two boxes to fit the length of my window. I used packing tape to join the two boxes together and made it stronger by folding up all the flaps, rather than cutting them off.
Next I folded my wadding in half (I only had thin wadding on hand) and placed it on top of the cardboard. Again I used packing tape to keep it in place.
Then I lay my furnishing fabric over the wadding, folded the ends over and stapled around the edges. The fabric wasn't long enough so I had to join two pieces together. For a more polished finish I thought about sewing the two fabric pieces together, but I knew I was going to hide the join anyway so after ironing I simply butted the fabric ends together over the base and stapled in place.
