Railings etc

Making the curtains, I also had to make the railings and tie backs for them to hang from. This actually took me longer to make than the curtains did...
for the railings, I went to a hardware shop and bought 3 5 foot wooden poles for a pound each, which was much more cost effective than going to B&Q and buying curtain rail packs for about 12 pounds. I painted these dark brown to match the rest of them room and glazed them to make them look like actual wood, and not just brown paint.
To make the little shaped pieces on the ends of all the rails i used the spinning machine in the workshop. i had to cut out squares of soft wood then dress up in the boiler suit and welding mask. then what you do is get a mallet and bang one end of the wood block into the left hand spike to give it an anchor. next take the other clamp and slide it down untill it latches on to the other end of the wood.
ensure its all tight and safe byu spinning it slowly with your hand and if it doesnt touch the protective plate at the front and doesnt make any rattling noises, you're good to go.
You take a kind of chisel and hold it flat against the metal plate. If you hold it horizontally to the wood and anchor it into your body, it forms a good solid resistance to cut the wood with. Slowly  move the chisel left and right to create a cylindrical shape; and after that just stress out the areas you want to get rid of. in my case I wanted the ends to look a bit like teardrops, so took away a lot of one end and left the other one fat.
It was a very time consuming process, however I feel I have majorlly improved on it and my last few pieces came out really nicely. Again, I painted these the same colour as the railings and glazed them.

I also needed to make the little brackets that the ranil attaches to the wall with. for this I just cut out a hooked shape on a fairly thick bit of wood, then used the sanders to make it rounded and circular. again i am really pleased with the final outcome of this.

After this was all dry I was able to connect all the components together to form one complete curtain rail. even though it was a lot cheaper, it was also very time consuming and took a lot of effort. however, im really glad I made everything myself, im very pleased with the end result.

Before I could hang the curtains up though, i needed to make the curtain tiebacks. I used MDF to create the shapes (for the living room  went for a leafy kind of motif to fit in with the wallpaper and also the art nouveau style, and in gregors room i made it kind of like a big swirl, just like I showed in one of my initial designs. i then attached the tie back to the lower edge of Karen's windows, so finally I could put up the curtain rails and curtains. I am happy its all finished now though, they caused me a fair amount of stress...