One Curtain At A Time

It had been long enough since I last made curtains that I had time to forget how much I don't like making curtains, so I decided it was time to make some more curtains.

I started easy, with the exterior door in the basement.  The curtain I replaced was something I had made...15? years ago.  The fabric was from the old Walmart $1/yard mill end tables; it was a very 1970s kind of multi greens acrylic yarn open weave TEXTURE fabric, which I still think is hilarious, but it hasn't been my personal style for a while.

I had a few lace curtains in my fabric stash, including a coordinating valance and curtain panel that seemed just right.  There's only on curtain rod on the door, though, so I decided to gather the valance to the width of the panel and sew them together above and below the rod pocket.  I was pretty proud of that solution.

Turned out the lace curtain panel was ten inches too short to cover the entire door window--in retrospect, the valance was probably intended to be hung at the top of the window, with the panel hung about halfway down.  I had forgotten people did that with curtains until I started looking at references.

Since the whole point of having a curtain on that door was to make it hard to see inside, any kind of gap was unacceptable.

I did have another lace panel, with a folded-over top section to simulate a valance.  Turned out that it was about twelve inches too long. It also had a small stain on it, so I started to put it away, thinking that, whatever project I ended up making with it, I'd need to cut it

wait

...I could cut it...for this project...

So I cut off the fold-over top part just below the bottom of the panel side of the rod pocket (I'd picked out the rod pocket stitching years ago), then measured up from the bottom and cut the panel there.  I aligned the top of the cut edge of the panel with the upper fold of the valance, then stitched above and below the rod pocket lines.

Just right.

And I can still see out clearly enough to watch the groundhog family that lives just beyond our property line.