* I received this fabric from The Ribbon Retreat free of charge. All designs and opinions are 100% my own.
Hello, hello! Today I have another installment for you in the Dr. Seuss room series. Have you see my son’s Dr. Seuss bedroom? It is so wild and colorful, and I love it with all of my heart! Today we are going to talk about the simple window valance that I made for his room. I didn’t want to do anything major for curtains, and this tube valance was a perfect way to make something CRAZY simple that still gave the window a finished look and a bit of oompf. Let’s get started!
For my son’s window valance I used the Bright Stripes Celebrate Seuss fabric from The Ribbon Retreat. I used three yards of it, but you may not need that much. Let’s talk about that now.
The first thing that you will need to do is measure your window’s width. Over my son’s window was the valance rod (here is an example of a valance rod) that my mom put up 20 years ago, which is flat and wide. It stretched over the window to be about 86 inches long and 3 inches wide. I wanted plenty of room in length to scrunch the valance up a bit so that it didn’t have to be perfectly flat, since this is a silly Dr. Seuss room, after all, and it obviously had to go all the way around in width, so I cut a strip of fabric that was 8 inches wide and 108 inches long (three yards). Since it is only 8 inches wide I could have gotten all of the length and more from one yard of fabric, but I chose not to because I thought that the pattern would be very difficult to match up on the seams, and I knew I would use the rest of the fabric for my throw pillows and other projects later on. I actually wish I had made it even longer or even doubled the length so it would have been super scrunched up, but I do like it the way that it turned out.
Once you have cut your strip iron your fabric. At the ends fold and iron the ends about 1/2″ and sew them into place as shown.
Now simply fold your fabric in half lengthwise (or the “hot dog” way as I would say to my elementary students—not the “hamburger way) so that the right side of the fabric faces inward, as shown, and sew the tube shut.
Turn your tube inside out and go slide it onto your valance rod! Can you believe how SIMPLE that was?? Score.
Be sure to check out the rest of the Dr. Seuss room tutorials, and have a great day!
Stephanie says
What paint colors did you use for the stripes and the yellow?
Sarah Westover McKenna says
I’m sorry, but I can’t remember! :/