Paper Valance

Just after Thanksgiving last year, my husband and I decided to paint our living room. For those of you that remember the old room, the pink is gone, and has been replaced by an awesome tan faux finish that Tom did a great job on. Right around the time that Tom was painting was when I was asked to prepare cover art for the new catalogue/inspiration book, and I was provided with some of the new Amberly Grace paper to work with.

Talk about inspiration. When I was cleaning up the scraps, I noticed how well the paper went with the colors we used on the wall. In fact, I loved the multi-colored pattern of one of the sheets so much that I took it with me as a reference when I was looking for fabric to make a new valance for the window. Well, you know how it is when you really love something and after a while nothing else seems good enough? That's what was happening with my piece of paper. All of the fabric I looked at just wasn't as perfect for the room as my piece of paper. And that got me thinking. What if I could make the valance out of paper? Then I would have exactly what I wanted. So, Tom and I found a pattern for a valance that would lend itself to being done in paper, and I anxiously awaited for the new catalogue to come out so I could purchase more packs of paper and work on my valance.

I put my order in right away, and the box arrived while I was in San Antonio. Last weekend, I worked on the valances. First I got a bunch of posterboard and cut it to the size the pattern recommended, then I covered each piece of posterboard with paper from the Amberly Grace collection. I folded everything, even attaching vellum to the pieces that one would usually consider to be the backside of the fabric had I used real fabric so that it would really look like the backside of the fabric. Then I embellished it with fringe and tassels from the fabric store. We hung the completed valance last Monday. Here's how it turned out.

It's amazing to me that my passion for this paper really produced a project that surpassed what it was created for. My use for it even exceeded The Angel Company's expectations. I sent them pictures when I finished and they posted it to the demonstrators only portion of their website with the description "we received some photos of an astounding project that had the entire corporate office gasping in awe".

As for how to clean it?, my thought on that comes right from one of our TAC stamp sets "Life is too short...to worry about dust." I'm sure that with a little regular dusting, they'll be just fine, and I'm not any more worried about it than I would be if I'd made them from fabric.

This project is a perfect example of how TAC wants people to feel about their products. They want their products to breathe life into your project. And that's exactly what happend for me. Hopefully this story will inspire you to try a new project, especially one that may be a little outside the box. You never know what you can do with your imagination.