North Sink Window Curtain

Finally, the last curtain for this project!  I had not made any plans at all for this window, because I knew I'd be dealing with scraps at this point.

I had initially thought I'd have a few inches of the brown and brown plaid left, but I did not.

I had initially thought maybe I'd have enough of the large floral--in the form of the fabric cut to form the arches on the door curtains--to make another curved valance for this window.  I did not.

I finally went with a simple short panel, gathered onto the curtain rod.  The length was determined by pieces of the large floral, which I had to piece to get enough width to gather nicely, and that width was determined by what was left of the sheet lining fabric.

 

I sewed the floral to the lining, right sides together and leaving an opening to turn, then stitched all around the edges (which is how I closed the turning opening), then pieced rejected poplin strips that hadn't worked for rod pockets on other parts of this project and sewed that on and the whole project was done.

I know I will only like them more as I start to forget how annoying they were to make.

Door Curtains

I was very happy with how the curtains turned out for the east window, so I jumped right into making the panels for the back door.  That enthusiasm did not stick around for the whole project.

Nothing was tricky or hard, it was just all so boring.

 

East Curtains

I had started with around four yards of the 58" wide secondhand heavyweight cream and espresso plaid (trying to think of a charitable way to say "brown and brown.")  The fabric had been in the stash for years, thinking it would be a...cape?  So it was a surprise when I recently realized I could use it for interior decorating purposes.  It was definitely interior decorating weight, and I suspected it was from the 1970s, if not earlier.  Pressing it with a hot iron yielded a smell that backed that idea up.

I knew that wouldn't be enough on its own to cover everything I wanted to cover, so I got into the stash and pulled out a heavier cotton chintz-type floral print (it's unglazed, so it's technically not chintz.)  There was three yards of 45" of that, which made a possibly more suitable amount of fabric for this project, but I wanted more to make sure. After poking through the stash more, I settled on what was left of the small floral poplin from another project where I (unexpectedly) also needed more fabric. That brought me to a bit over eight yards.  I threw in a twin size cotton sheet--bought ages ago to be potential backing for a quilt--to use as lining, and was  ready to start.

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.

Impulse Curtains (and tablecloth and more curtains and a windowsill runner and oh look another curtain)

Two days ago was the first Saturday of the month, which--around here, at least--is "half off everything in the store" day at all the Goodwills.  I have recently taken back up with houseplants again, and had the idea I could go to the Goodwill that I hadn't gone to earlier in the week and grab some cache pots for cheap, and also maybe find a mirror to put behind the shelf recently installed in here to hold houseplants.

I did find a few cache pots, but no suitable mirrors.  And I also saw this

Marked $9.99, so $5, with indeterminately many yards rolled up in the tube, and with stripes in a nice watermelon-y pink color.  At first I scoffed, because what use would I have for so much interior decorating weight cloth?

Curtains!

So, somewhere around 2012, I made curtains

Nothing fancy, and I happened to have a lot of this cloth

which I'm pretty sure was from the glory days of the $1/yard Walmart mill ends bins.  I don't know how long I had it before making these curtains for the living room window, two curtains for the back door windows, a short curtain for the top of the over-sink kitchen window, and a tablecloth custom-fit to the kitchen table.

I do still like the print, but I was also ready for some changes.