Previous green dining room with orange curtains:
Current light blue dining room with orange curtains:
Initially I thought I wanted some sort of print for the curtains, but Jake was somewhat firm when he said he wanted a more neutral color for the curtains. Which after some thought, I agreed with him and figured if I want to do something crazy I can always use some fun fabric when/if I recover the dining room chair seats. I did get Jake to meet me in the middle and let me get a neutral colored fabric that had a design within the same color, so at least there would be a little pizazz to the curtains.
I looked at about every home decor and special occasion fabric at Jo-Ann's and Hobby Lobby and could not find any fabric I liked that a) was a shade of cream/ivory to complement the paint color, b) was a reasonable price, and c) had an interesting design to it. I felt very discouraged after spending about 2 hours looking at fabric at Jo-Ann's and not liking any of it!
The next day I was at Target and figured I had nothing to lose by scouring their curtains aisle and basically wandering around aimlessly (as I do most of the time when I go to Target and don't have a timetable). I came across these curtains on one of the aisle end-caps on clearance for $5.98 per curtain:
They were 54" wide and 84" tall. What I needed were 5 curtains that are 46" wide and 28" tall. So I had to get two packages. At first I only found one package, but after some digging I found another one buried under a bunch of other random things on clearance. There were a few good things about buying these curtains: 1) They were way cheaper than purchasing 4 yards of fabric, even if the fabric was on sale for $5/yard. 2) I could return them if the color didn't look good and wouldn't be stuck with a cut of fabric I regretted buying. 3) The material had a perfect transparency to it; transparent enough to let light in, but solid enough to not let everyone perfectly see into our dining room at night.
Once I got home I held the curtains up to the walls and to this wall hanging I fell in love with and purchased after repainting the dining room to ensure they complimented both (which they did):
Next I hung each up separately on the metal hooks to see if Jake and I liked the way they looked. I then had to start seam-ripping the seams out on both the top and bottom because I needed the entire 84" of fabric for making 3 curtains (28" height x 3 = 84") and 46" width. Here's a picture of the tedious seam-ripping. Luckily it didn't take too long once I started going.
Once I seam ripped the top and bottom seams of both curtains, I got out my trusty iron and started ironing away:
Finally I was ready to start cutting! Which was actually the hardest and most time consuming part of making these curtains. Because the material was fairly flimsy, stretchy, and had a noticeable large print design to it, I couldn't fold it and use my rotary cutter/cutting mat/large ruler like I usually do to cut fabric. Instead I had to lay each curtain out on my bed on top of one another and match up the designs. I had to cut the side hem off of one to get it to match up to the other curtain, and then had to constantly match up the curtains to cut a 46" width. I used my tape measure to make the 28" cuts, but had to be pretty accurate since I had no wiggle-room for errors as I needed to use the entire 84" of the one curtain to make 3 small curtains out of. I will say it was probably the most shoddy-looking cutting job I've done, but I did get the designs to match up on all 5 curtains so I was pretty happy about that!
Next I hung the curtains with raw edges on the hooks in the dining room to see how much room I had for the hems of each one:
I figured out I had more than enough room to do a 1/4 or 1/2 inch hem, so I started ironing and pinning a hem over. I thought I might end up a little short on fabric if I folded the fabric over two times and pinned before I hemmed it instead of once, so if I had enough fabric to do two folds then sew I would do that so no raw edge showed in the back. I'm thinking no one will notice but when I wash them they edges in the back will probably fray pretty easily.
I ironed over each side, pinned, then ironed again before sewing.
When I sewed the hems, I sewed from the right-side of the fabric so the top-stitch would be seen instead of the bottom stitch.
There was only 2 instances where I didn't fold over the fabric far enough to stitch through the top fabric and the folded over fabric. In one instance, I realized it pretty soon after I missed sewing the folded over fabric, so I seam-ripped a good 4 inches and restitched the two pieces of fabric together. In the other instance, I had to hand sew a few stitches and made sure to iron the fold really well in the space I missed.
After I sewed all of the sides of each curtain I was finally able to put them up and admire how great they turned out! Finally, the green and orange are out of the dining room for good!
Oh, and I do have to say that another highlight of the week was when Jake unexpectedly brought me some flowers home from the store. They do look quite nice up close and on the dining room table :)
Rachel
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