Curtains now in place, but how to pull everything together?

Three swags and one tail have now gone up so I am starting to see the effect. I am quite pleased with my efforts, considering it's the first pair of curtains I have made. There are some defects. The fringe is causing some puckering in two of the swags because I pulled the thread too tight.

The bigger issue now is how to pull the whole colour scheme together. The gold of the silk is brighter and yellower than the ochre of the woodwork, cornice and gold of the picture frames, and the current rugs, cushions, furniture table lamps etc are still a bit of a mess. I think I need to reinforce the gold colour of the silk eg by use of cushions and lampshapes. I also need to choose a fabric for a chaise longue I bought at auction and which is at the restorers.

What should this be upholstered in?

Interior decorating is hard to get right.

First Swag Completed

The first swag is finished (only five more to make now):

The fringe came with the ends sealed with cellotape. When I took it off everything started unravelling which was most alarming. I coped with it by oversewing several times. A better solution, which I learned from some helpful people on http://my.decozo.com/index.php, the soft furnishing and curtain making discussion forum, was to use glue. This was confirmed by a quick visit to Henry Newbery's shop just off Oxford Street http://www.henrynewbery.com/contact.html. They recommended using a hot glue gun, then hitting the end down onto a piece of glass to cool it and flatten the end.

The full swag, complete with lining interlining and fringe, behaves a little differently from my mock up in lining fabric. It holds its shape much better, but doesnt come down quite as far even though it was made from the same pattern.

I am quite pleased with the appearance. One purpose of the green and yellow fringe was to tie the curtains into the wallpaper, which is a dark green damask design, from Watts of Westminster (no relation) http://www.wattsofwestminster.com/. The green is a good match with the wallpaper but the yellow in the fringe, which is a cool lemon, doesnt really match the yellow of the silk which is a warm gold. I am not entirely happy with this, but I guess I will need to wait to see the whole thing assembled and in place before really being able to judge.

Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian"

Thanks to the wonders of Bookfinder http://www.bookfinder.com/ I have now manged to track down a copy of Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian". It is a fairly weighty quarto volume, published privately, documenting the all too brief life of Julian Royds Gribble VC. It was assumed that he had died on a first world war battlefield, but it was later discovered that he had been captured and was a PoW. Before he could be released however he succumbed to the flu pandemic.

Norah, his grief stricken mother, seems never to have been able to come to terms with her son's death and in 1923 published this biography, including all the letters he had written to her as a child. It is almost too poignant to read.

Norah, a member of the Royds family and my great grandmother's first cousin, was painted by Singer Sergent when she was younger. The Taubman museum in Roanoke, Virginia now owns the picture and has named their cafe after her. http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/

It is difficult for us now to understand this kind of suffering. My grandmother lost her twin brother in WWI but her way of coping seems to have been the opposite of Norah's. According to my mother she never spoke about him.