Jack ‘n Tracie

Jack and I decided we needed new curtains for our living room. First of all, the ones we had were room-darkening draperies. At our old apartment, we got direct sunlight into our living room most of the day. This was great unless it was a hot summer day and you were trying to block the heat. So we got nice thick dark green drapes to block the sun when needed.

Those same draperies happened to fit the window in our home when we bought it, so naturally we hung them. But this living room is ‘light-challenged’. It faces northeast so it doesn’t get much direct sunlight at all. Only for a few minutes daily. With the big shady porch, this room just doesn’t get enough light. Having room-darkening draperies wasn’t the best and made this room seem almost gloomy to me.

What we wanted was something light and airy but added color to the room to help with the gloominess. We chose sheers in this hannah pattern (not the purple, the rose pattern panels in the middle). It’s just beautiful and compliments the room nicely. For a valance we wanted to do a scarf valance. We loved the simple, elegant look. Something similiar to this but in a sheer, or like this.

Once everything we ordered arrived, we were so excited to get them hung. The sheer panels went up without a hitch. But the sheer scarf valance??? O.M.G.

First, they come in basically one length: 6 yards. They are about 4 feet wide. So this is a huge piece of material. Second, our window is an odd width. One wasn’t really enough, so the saleslady suggested two and combining them in the middle. So now we had 12 yards of sheer material to work with.

Now, I worked in the drapery department at Sears for about a year (many moons ago) so I do have some experience hanging window treatments. But they didn’t have scarf valances then so I never learned how to hang those. They look so simple though, right? WRONG. They suck. Maybe if you have a thicker and easy-to-fold cotton material it’s not so bad, but when you are working with slippery hard-to-fold polyester material it’s another story.

First, you need to fan fold the material. When you’re working with 6 yard slippery material, this isn’t easy. We tried a variety of ways to fold them and were not very successful at first. So I googled how do to it. Unfortunately what I found was a lot of people struck and frustrated just like us asking “how the heck?”. (Actually, that made us feel better. They really *aren’t* as easy as they look.) In the end we used paperclips to hold our pleats together till we got them on the rod (which was another challenge in itself) then took the clips out.

Second, twelve yards was way too long! If we just combined them in the middle, we ended up with about 5 feet of extra material that ran along the floor on each side of the window. Not practical for my family, and not attractive at all. So we tried to do both but overlapping them and making many swoops across the rod. It was not pretty. We struggled for hours, literally (4 to be exact) between keeping our pleats and hanging and re-hanging, swooping, and re-swooping and nothing we did looked right. We even tried to lift the extra off the floor to give kind of a balloon effect with the extra on the side… no go. It was all bad.

So we tried to do just one. If we did it evenly across the window, the ends only hung about halfway down the middle of the window on each side. It reminded me of a bowl haircut. Not pretty. So we tried to do the lopsided look like in this picture. But the lopsided look wasn’t going to work for our window. It was too wide and short so it just looked like the window was going to tip over. Even the kids were like “ewwww”. *sigh* (Note in that picture the window is taller than it is wide, ours is the opposite.)

After 4.5 hours of struggling with this “simple” look we gave up. It just wasn’t meant to be.

I went back through the catalog and found this. Looky that. A ’simple swoop look’ but with rod pockets! Woo… *drool* So yesterday we took the scarves back and got the listette valances with rod pockets. They should arrive within a few days.

Ya know, I knew at this point that we weren’t the first to return the scarf valances. In fact, one of the two we purchased was in a different package than the other and missing its paper insert, so I knew when we bought it it was a return. That should have been our first clue!

I have to share this too: while I returned the scarves and chatted with the sales lady, true to form Jack had a ‘moment’. They had remote control blinds on display. Of course he had to play with them. But the battery in the remote was dead so he couldn’t get them to work. Then he dropped the remote very loudly on the counter in front of the display and made a huge commotion as he tried to act all calm and composed. As if. He quieted the area and all eyes turned to him. Then everyone giggled. I can’t take him anywhere. He’s seriously worse than the kids somtimes!

Anyway, maybe if our window was smaller the scarves wouldn’t have been so bad… or maybe if we had used sconces instead of a decorative rod, but really… I can’t stress enough, sheer scarf valances are NOT SIMPLE to hang! It wasn’t a happy experience. In fact, for both Jack and I, it was pure torture. *twitch*