My First Mistreatment

It's time for the mistreatment party at The Nester's place! I'm so excited! I had been planning this mistreatment in my head for a while and today's party was just the motivation I needed to get it out of my head and onto my windows. I'm so thrilled with how it came out.

Do you want to see how I did it? It's kind of a combination of a mistreatment and a furniture rehab project like this one. It's probably going to take me longer to write this post than it took me to do the actual project.

Here are the windows before they were mistreated. Let me just say that I don't envy The Nester trying to take pictures of all her window mistreatments. It's hard to get a good picture of a window! There was apparently a spaceship landing outside of mine. Ahhhhhhh!!!! Bright light!!!

First,, get yourself some of these. They're L brackets and I used two per window.

Then two of these cut to the width that you need. They're 2x6's cut to 1" wider than my window frame.

Now, get yourself up on a chair and attach the L brackets to the wall so that the placement of the screws right before you try to hang the finished treatment. While you're up there, wave at your people neighbors who already think you're a freak because of all the spray paint and photo shoots with the bovine neighbors.

Then take the brackets off the wall and mounted them on the 2x6's. This way, you can hang the completed treatment without fussing with the screw placement since you've already pre-drilled the wall holes. Make sense?

Now comes the fun part...playing with the fabric.

Each mistreatment is just one piece of fabric doubled over. For this one, I wanted my finished treatment to be about 18" long so I cut the fabric 38" long. That's 2x the length plus two inches that will go over the top.

Fold your fabric in half like this. The raw edges will be the top so don't worry about them. The bottom is your "hem".



Now, glue on some trim to the hem. Yep. Hot glue.

Next you need to place your 2x6 with the brackets in place on the fabric so you can start attaching it. The flat part of the bracket is going to be against the wall so you're looking at the back of the mistreatment here. Make sure that you get it positioned so there is an equal amount of fabric below the wood on each side. My wood is about 1.5" and I have 16" below the wood on both ends.

Now you start attaching. I used two upholstery tacks on the ends to hold the fabric in place.

Then I started using the good old staple gun on the top. This part is going to be against the ceiling so you won't see it.

Keep stapling all the way around the top.

Now I flipped it over and went around the top with upholstery tacks to add a little more visual interest.

Then get yourself back up on the chair and hang them up!