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You want a scarf swag to dress your window. You want exactly the right size and you want exactly the right fabric. You also want some scarf swag hanging ideas. So you don’t want much, do you? Can you have it all and on a tiny budget. You bet you can and it’s super easy to do. In fact a couple of hours is all will take.

First choose your curtain fabric

Most fabrics will do the job well, but avoid really thick heavy fabrics. Sheers and voile’s work really well. Silks and faux silk curtain fabrics are a good choice too. Most fabrics come at around 54 inches wide. Some are a little wider some a little narrower. That’s fine, just don’t go for double width fabric that’s far to much.

Measuring up your window for your scarf swag

For a simple swag you will need a curtain rod over your window to hang it from. So if you don’t have one then get one and fit it. It needs to be fitted 6 to 8 inches over your window. This will allow you to drape the swag into a good shape without covering to much of the glass area. The curtain rod need to extend past the window each side by about 5 inches. This will allow the sides of your swag to hang down the sides of your window and not over it.

To work out how much fabric you need you need to add together 3 things.

1. The width of your curtain rod.
2. The length you want the swag to fall too on the left (from the rod to maybe the floor).
3. Then repeat step 2 for the right side of your swag.

Then add these measurements together and that’s it. The answer is the total length of the fabric you need. Allow a couple of extra inches for hems.

Making your scarf swag

So you now have a long length of fabric straight off a roll at the full width. Then the next step is to hem all the sides. Don’t panic you don’t have to sew unless you want to. I often use fusible hemming tape for projects like this. It’s simply the stuff you use to hem trousers and skirts with using a hot steam iron. So really simple to use just take your time I don’t want any burnt fingers.

You simply fold over your sides twice about roughly half an inch and press down. Now you need to tuck a strip of the hemming tape under the seam and press down well with plenty of steam. This stuff sticks really well on most fabrics so should stay where you put it for a long time.

Preparing your scarf swag ready for hanging

Right you will need to clear a long section of floor space to lay out your swag. Now you really need an extra pair of hands to help. You need one person at each end. Take hold of the swag and both start to pleat the fabric back and forth. You will end up with around 4 or 5 pleats depending how big you make. Just a quick note your pleats should start and finish facing in the same direction.

Now you need cut some strips of fabric, any old stuff will do. They are to tie around your pleated swag at intervals to hold it in place while you lift it on to your curtain rod.

Hanging and dressing your swag

This bit can take a bit of time to get just right tweaking and teasing the swag into shape and getting the sides at even lengths. Start by hanging your swag over your rod at each end. The middle part of the swag hangs over the front of the rod and the sides hang down behind the rod.

Now you have your tied up swag roughly in place and evened up. You should take of your tied bands and start to tease the center part of the swag down. Keep doing this until you create a nice scoop shape.

You will notice the top of the swag moves down with it. We don’t want this so we have to pull the the outside edge of the hanging parts of your swag (the tails). This will lift the top of your swag while hopefully keeping the bottom scoop shape in place.

Really other than a bit more teasing and tweaking to get it exactly as you want it, that’s it all nice and simple. So go and give a go yourself.

Lee Stevens has been involved with the making and fitting of all kinds of window treatments for many years. He now writes many “How to” articles to help other create their own window treatments of their dreams. http://www.window-treatments-made-easy.com/make-scarf-swags.html – For more instruction and pictures on scarf swags and other projects for you to try visit me now. Do you have a window treatment problem that needs an answer the Ask The Expert