Bedroom Sheers

This project is to make sheers and drapes for 4 bedroom windows.  In this post, I describe the sheers project.  The sheers are for tall windows in a room with a 10' ceiling.  We decided on a length of 109".  The sheers will be stationary (non-moving), with one width of fabric evenly pinch-pleated across the width of the window. 

    

 The materials included 14 yards of sheer voile fabric, about 13 yards of sheer header tape, and thread.





After measuring and measuring again, I tore the fabric for each panel about a half-inch above the desired cut and then cut a clean edge with my rotary cutter.  Before doing anything else, I also cut off the selvages to prevent that slight bit of puckering you get with sheer voile.

 The hem was to be a double 6" hem.  Voile is famously slippery and hard to work with.  To help make the hem accurate, I placed some masking tape at the 6" mark and used it as a guide to turn up the hem twice, pin and iron in place.

To secure the hem, I stitched along the top edge  very close to the fold.  It needed to be pressed one more time, stretching and holding the stitching area each time until it was cool.  I think of voile kind of like hair - after heating (with the iron) you need to hold it in place until it cools so it will retain its shape.

Below - pinning the hem, the stitched hem being pressed.

 

To attach the header, I sewed the edge of the header to the wrong side of the voile, one half inch below the top of the panel, as shown below.  Then folded the header over twice and pinned it to the panel, pressed, stitched, and pressed again.

 

 The side hems were a double 1.5" fold, pinned, stitched, and pressed.

  
 
The pleats were done in the usual way, marked, folded and stitched, then pinched and tacked at the bottom.  I felt I needed an extra tack at the top (see above) to keep the pleats from popping out.

 Here are the finished, installed sheers, hanging on sheer rods with standard drapery pins.  They are hanging with drapes that had just been installed but not yet trained!  My next blog post describes the drapes.