Way back in March during Spring Break, before Annelisa was here, before all of the change and events of the last four months, I met with two interior decorators about a problem in our house...
the eye brow window!
When we first saw these windows in the house we loved them, they are in both back upstairs bedrooms. They face south providing great natural light during the day (as you can see in the picture above!) and night (if you are so inclined as to moon watch out of them). Needless to say, my love of the windows was tempered by the expectation of a sweet little lady who would need to go to bed when the sun is still up! So the decorators came up with a plan for us...then Annelisa's
birth, her
illness, and life happened with our precious daughter! Finally in June, Christopher and I began and completed our first crafty project for the nursery!
How we did it:
It began by going to the big orange box (Home Depot) to pick out a piece of MDF, having them cut it into two manageable pieces to fit in the CRV, and bringing it home. We then traced a template onto a cut open lawn refuse bag. Christopher then took the template and traced it onto the MDF, cut it out, and then sanded the edges. We chose to spray paint the back glossy white to match the trim in our house. At this point our solution looked like this:
Next, we covered the board with batting that I purchased at Jo-Ann's in early June. We used an ordinary staple gun with 5/16 staples to do this.
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| Beginning to cut out batting |
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| Almost done cutting out the batting |
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| The batting cut down to size, with an extra two inches around the perimeter of the board. |
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| The back of the board. |
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| The front of the board. |
I learned or realized after completing these steps that I should have used one of the manufactured edges as the bottom instead of cutting out the shape from the middle of the 2 yards of batting. Then I would have not wasted as much of it...perhaps pillows are in my future! :)
The next step was to cover the board with fabric. Following basically the same steps, of cutting the fabric down to size, then stapling it around the top, bottom, then the two respective east and west sides; making sure it was pulled taut as we went. We folded the corners like we were wrapping a present and then stapled down the folds. This time I used the manufactured edge for the bottom of the board, as seen in the first picture below.
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| Cutting out the fabric |
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| Working out the corner folds |
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| Back of board before trimming fabric around the staples. |
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| Front of the board. |
We realized at this point in the process that we should have pre-drilled holes for the two handles we placed on the board to make it easy to move the board into and out of the window. Despite not having pre-drilled the holes, we proceed to attach our handles anyways...with lots of measuring and hand screwing due to the fabric and batting getting caught in the drill.
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| Measure, make notes, measure again, cut hole in fabric and batting to begin attaching handle. |
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| Close-up of measuring...this right angle ruler is so helpful! |
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| The back of the board with handle attached. |
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| Ready for it's debut! |
We finished the cornice board late one evening, so the next night it went to work for us in place of the pillows we had been using to block the light at night.
The cornice board in action! We store it under her crib during the day. The handles are spaced such that either of us can lift the cornice into the window. The fabric also appears in her bumper and it was the inspiration for the paint color.
Our inspiration for this project came from the decorators at CDK Designs in Plano. I read tutorials on HGTV.com and on Young House Love (listed to the right, as a blog I follow) for how to make an upholstered head board which we then applied to a movable cornice board. I also watched a YouTube video about how to make a cornice board to help us with the process. All in all, we are proud of our project and love its usefulness!
