Window Treated

My living room boasts an enormous picture window which overlooks the living room. The recess is 3.12m by 1.65m. Such a large window is best covered by full length curtains, but a radiator placed under the windowsill made this inadvisable. I have been fretting for years about what to do with it, but now it is a well-dressed window and another job can be ticked off my list.

The window is covered by a single roman blind. It was a horrible sewing job and one which I would tackle differently with hindsight. Imagine wrestling all that fabric through the sewing machine throat - it was a struggle! We used a very nifty piece of blind engineering by Super Gliss which raises and lowers the blind via a chain attached to a special track. The blind tapes are fed through a tape which also houses fine fibreglass rods, which make the pleats a little crisper. I made full-length dress curtains on either side of the window, hung from a handsome steel curtain rod and curtain rings from John Lewis, and finally completed the "outfit" with a simple pelmet hung from the same pole by the same rings, which gives the illusion that the blind is also hanging from the pole. I used a textured navy cotton velvet chenille which is lined and interlined with a bonded purpose-made fabric, also from John Lewis. Now we can keep cosy and I can move on to the next projects - the living room leather sofas could do with some new cushions so cover-making will be fun to plan.