After Ithe nails are hammered into the board it was time to start on the fabric. I
I needed to cut and trim the fabric into 4 panels. Here's a handy little tip I came across over at Craftaholics Anonymous. A way to easily cut a straight line in the burlap is to pull out one of the strings/fibers at the cutting point. It leaves you with a nice little gap that serves as a cutting line. Very handy!
Here's another great tip about burlap I came across, this time at Life to the T. Burlap tends to be pretty stiff since it's more of a grassy type fiber rather than fabric. To get a nice "wavey" look, shape it how you want it to look and use clothespins to hold it in place and let it hang and it will start to take on that shape. Ideally, let it hang for a couple of days for the best results. Personally, I'm too impatient for that and mine only stayed clipped for maybe a day.
I can sew some basic stitches, but I wasn't sure how difficult it would be to sew burlap and I didn't even want to try. I just ironed a good stiff hem along the top.
My original intention was to let the panels hang straight like Michael did up there in my inspiration picture, and maybe add a bit of trim of some sort. But after I got them up it just didn't look right for some reason. Hubs wasn't impressed either. We stood there and mulled it over and tried this and that. (Now, he's a man's man, loves guns and hunting, he used to be a cowboy, he's currently going to school to be a diesel mechanic, his job is fixing huge semis, and in a perfect world his meals would be meat with a side of meat. BUT...when I'm stuck and not sure what to do he's always willing to be my sounding board and I can just talk it out and run my ideas past him, and 9 times out of 10 he has great feedback. This is reason #86 that I love him completely, all the way down to his oddly formed pinky toe.)
After talking it out with him an idea hit me and he liked the sound of it, too. I wanted to make tiebacks, so I bought a couple of yards of jute webbing and some Aleen's Tacky Glue.
I cut each tieback about 18 inches long, applied the glue, then I just wrapped them around the gathered burlap and pinched them together to hold them in place. I frayed the bottom edges of them by simply removing a few rows of fibers and that's it. For more info please visit The Cozy Old Farmhouse Blog.