Cornice Progress

Now that I have the cornice moldings painted and installed, I really like them. So much better than the original trim I had on the window tops. I learned how to use on hand supplies, just 1/8" basswood and chair rail trim, to really dress up the frames. If I'm smart, I'll make molds of the fancy resin pieces and have them on hand for future projects.

I like the lower profile and finer detail of the decorative resin piece I used on the dining room cornice, but I only had one. I still like the ones in the living room, just not as much.

I assembled the cornices using the arched front pieces I made on the Cricut, then added structure pieces on the top and sides using 1/2" x 1/8" pine scraps that I had on hand. I painted them with the Americana Blue Mist, the darker of the two shades in the color scheme since it was a closer match to the almost see through fabric.

The fabric is nice and lightweight, so it was fairly easy to mold onto the cornice forms using only Quick Grab Tacky glue. I really like the texture and wish I could get my hands on more of this fabric in different colors!

You can see that the color is a nice complement to the wall color, and is an almost perfect match to the darker door color. I like the way you can see the decorative moldings under the arch, so I'll most likely just have straight panels hanging down on either side.

I have the test pieces iron hemmed, pleated and sprayed. I'll pull them out when dry and see if the Stiffen Quick seems like it will do the job (from Brae's tutorial). If not, I'll try additional test pieces with Elizabeth's damp fabric/gel glue tutorial, or Sheila's watered down white glue method. One thing I noticed on my test fabric is that I'll need to have careful measurements overall and carefully calculate the hem into them. I ended up with a longer pleat on the end of the right fabric because it was too short for another pleat. I imagine this would look bad if it happened to my "real" fabric.

Also, I was watching a movie called The Queen. I noticed that all of the white moldings appeared to have some sort of gilding or highlighting and it looked amazing. Not so stark, and the detail showed up better. I found a couple photos online. What do you think? Should I give it a try? Maybe just a bit of chalk pastels brushed on would make a difference.

Anyway, off to bed to dream about the panels. Hopefully, I'll have some show and tell to share in the next few days!

Sleep tight,

Jodi