Yes, it is true, I have finally busted my most glaring UFO. After 2 years in our current home we no longer have a living room with 3 unhemmed curtains, no, we have a living room with 4 hemmed curtains! No more missing curtains, no more raw uneven edges, no more linings that peep out from under the curtain. It is a weight of my shoulders and to be honest, I’m still having some trouble believing it myself.

That curtain on the left used to live in one of my closets.

Why did it take so long? Well, I just didn’t enjoy this project at all. I wanted these curtains to add warmth to our living room since we live in a house that certainly didn’t have good insulation as a requirement when it was build so I chose a thick fabric for the curtains and added another thick layer of insulating lining. This made the curtains very heavy and a real chore to work with. On top of that, I had to clear (and clean) the living room floor each time I worked on them because I needed a very large surface to lay them out. Sewing should be fun and these curtains most definitely didn’t count as fun.

In the end I managed to complete them because my boyfriend (who started to get somewhat annoyed at the missing 4^th curtain) helped out. Having someone else carry them each time they needed to be moved from the curtain rail to the floor, to the sewing machine, back to the floor, etc. and who helped with the fabric manipulation and made sure they didn’t slip off the table while sewing made a huge difference.

Wait… is that… a hem?

Are there no positives at all to this project? Well, I really like the brown/purple colour of the curtains (the colour doesn’t show very well in these very dark pictures) and we did get to play with my skirt marker, or as we really prefer its much cooler German name, my Rockabrunder. I also think that my attempt at adding insulation through the curtains did work. Only now my boyfriend is worried that the weight of the curtains will bring the curtain rails down. We’ll see.

Ooooh, let’s make fresh pasta! Or, maybe not…

This project made me realise that just because you can make something yourself this doesn’t mean that you have to make it yourself. It is a bit like making fresh pasta. Sure, you can do that, and it sounds very appealing, but do you ever make fresh pasta? Like many households we own a pasta machine and like 99% of the owners of a pasta machine we’ve used it maybe twice in the 5 or 6 years that we’ve had it. The thing is, contrary to what some tv chefs want you to believe, you do not whip up a fresh pasta dish in 5 minutes. I usually use dry pasta and when I want something a little more special I’ll get the fresh pasta that they sell in the supermarket, because that already tastes pretty good, right? (Although, how fresh is something that you can store in the fridge for 2 months?) Anyway, the thing is, I don’t bother to make fresh pasta myself because I can buy a pretty decent quality and this is going to be my attitude with curtains from now on. Why bother to make them when you can buy them. My future home decorating efforts will focus on pillows and quilts (just don’t expect anything king sized..).

So, dear friends and family, if you ever need new curtains, don’t come to me. I’m not even going to offer to help you make them yourself, that’s how much I didn’t like it. Although, I suppose, if you’re nice I might let you borrow my Rockabrunder because it was pretty helpful.