French "Rustic Toile" Valance

As you know I have been working on a little “facelift” for our guest bath; creating all kinds of projects to give it some elegant glamour and I finally just finished the last of my projects.  Woohoo!!!  My final project was to make a new valance to go over the bathroom window, something to tie everything all together.  I searched through all of my resources and did not find any inspirational ideas for valance style; however, they did help me to decide on the fabric type, color and pattern I wanted to use.  I chose (from my fabric stash) a nice home decor heavy weight fabric in a black and white toile print. Take a look.

This is the plain window with 2” wooden blinds already up and a basic white shower curtain, nothing special to look at here.

This is the fabric I had several pieces of in my stash, wonderful remnants I got at the fabric store for a steal, super pricey otherwise. The fabric is “Rustic Toile” by Waverly Fabrics from the home décor line, about 1 yard long. When I am working with an expensive piece of fabric which is going into a room where it may not stay for a long time I try to sew it up in a way which allows me to re-use it later.  Instead of cutting the fabric I used the whole piece by pressing the selvages under on the sides then folding it in half to create a self lining and turning down the top edges to make the rod casing and using the largest stitch allowance my machine would sew.  The long stitches are easy to take out if I ever want to turn the valance into whole fabric again.

Once I had the casing finished I hug the valance giving it a bit of pouf but I felt it was missing something.  I went to my notions stash and looked for something to give it a pop of black because the light print faded into the very white shower curtain right next to it creating a lack of contrast.  I found some really pretty French jet black pom-pom trim which seemed to pull out the black and give it more definition.  I simply used the same stitch length to sew it just below the casing stitching, easy to remove later down the line if I wanted to re-use either of the items.

Here we are all done and already hanging up right over the window.  I just love me some toile, I would put it everywhere if I could get away with it! I cannot show you how well it adds contrast with the shower curtain right now… you have to wait to see the whole thing in the reveal in my next post. Hehe!!!

Thanks for letting me share my final bling project for the guest bath facelift; I am very pleased with the results so far, I cannot wait to see what you all think.

See you soon.

Laurette