Craftsman Curtain Rods

My very talented wife has taken up sewing and I have to say that she has a real knack for it. She's in the process of making these curtains for our living room windows and I couldn't resist taking a picture to post. She still has a couple of things to complete such as trimming the thread ends and making the tie backs but I think they look pretty awesome. This blog however, is not about sewing, it's about woodworking. So not to be outdone, I decided to make the curtain rods for the windows and of course turned to the interwebs for inspiration. We did a search for craftsman style curtain rods and we found something very similar to what's show here.

I started by making the rod out of some scrap red oak I had. The only embellishment is that I cut small "pyramid" shapes at the ends of the rod. For the supports I found a 1" thick red oak board ans sketched the design right on it. I bored the mortises for the rod out with a forstner bit and cleaned out the hole with a mortising chisel and file. I then inlaid the walnut accent squares and then rounded over all the exposed edges with a coarse file and sandpaper. once this was done I turned my attention to how I was going to hang the thing. Now being a structural engineer you'd think that I'd had this figured out before I got to this point. But, I'm purposely trying not to over-engineer things and let the design come first. What I decided to do was take a trip to the hardware store for ideas. I found some small steel plates with "keyholes" in them that I could recess into the back of the supports using a router. I finished everything with a coat of Varathane mission oak stain topcoated with shellac. It turned out to be a fun little project that I was able to complete in a weekend for under $10. God I love woodworking!