A manual of black and white illustrations with over 300 designs for curtains and soft furnishings. Complete with an exciting easy to use Style Guide to quickly identify the appropriate window treatment for any situation. The twelve sections include Design Details, Poles, Valances, Bay Windows, Tall and Narrow Windows, Problem Windows, Beds and Accessories. The ultimate guide to the creative world of choosing and designing window treatments. Combining over 300 design ideas for curtains and soft furnishings with comprehensive notes and professional tips, this directory provides useful guidance to the creative world of choosing and designing window treatments. Included is a style guide for identifying suitable designs for any situation. Every year, when it might have been thought that the variety of curtain designs has reached its final limit, yet more styles and finishes manage to evolve. In the course of our work over the years, we have, as it were, test-driven a huge and ever-growing range of designs. This third edition of 'The Curtain Design Directory' aims to bring up to date fresh and inventive ways of dressing windows, allowing you to benefit from the hard-earned knowledge we've gained in our workroom. Every window really is different, and it is an awareness of that difference which leads to such a multiplicity of possibilities. We hope you will find inspiration here, whether you wish to reproduce our designs, or use them as a springboard for a greater flight of fancy, or simply draw key elements from them. A window to dress is, after all, an exciting challenge! Catherine & Rebecca, Redbourne, January 1999 Catherine Merrick & Rebecca Day run the well-known Merrick & Day curtain workroom in North Lincolnshire, making curtains for interior designers. They run regular courses on curtain making and have distilled their years of knowledge into several authoratitive books on curtains, including the curtain maker's essential companion, 'Encyclopaedia of Curtains' and the stimulating 'Curtain Inspiration'. Simply browse through the illustrations and choose the designs most appropriate for the windows you are dressing. Then choose the design details which complete the overall effect. The drawings can easily be photocopied for use on sample boards. To display colour and patterns, simply photocopy the chosen illustration onto clear acetate film and lay it over a fabric sample. Designs can also be combined by tracing different details onto the illustration of your choice. Or you can use an illustration as the basis for your own interpretation. However you use them, try and imagine the line drawings in three-dimensional fabric. The drawings are diagrammatic to help construction, but, after all, fabric hangs in softer, fluid folds. Then again, each fabric has its own look - silk with its glorious light play will look different from a crisp linen. To calculate fabric quantities, see 'The Fabric Quantity Handbook' for quick, easy-to-use tables. You will find some of the make-up techniques required here are explained in 'The Encyclopaedia of Curtains'.