Kitchen Curtains

So when we had the inside of the house painted last month I had the painters take down the old shades that were in the kitchen window. This quickly became my motivation to get the curtains done that I had always wanted in there. We started to feel like fish in a fishbowl.

When I was younger, I was in 4-H. I know what you're thinking but our group was called City Slickers. I didn't do anything country or that had to do with animals. Instead I did the crafty, sewing, cooking type activities. For the activities that were sewing related my Aunt Janelle helped me learn how to read a pattern and sew clothing.

Now fast forward say about 20+ years and I get an urge to sew curtains for the Texas house. Maybe it's being married and feeling domesticated or something. So I drug Sean to the fabric store to look at patterns with me (he probably wouldn't want me to tell everyone that). I ended up finding a pattern to make a Roman shade and found the most awesome fabric so I was ready to go.

First you start out with all the necessary items to make your curtains.

Even though I had a pattern, my windows were bigger then the pattern allowed so it took a lot of measuring and general math to figure out how much fabric was needed, etc. Well, on top of that I ended up picking a fabric with a pattern. Since all four windows are together the pattern had to match. All of that takes a little trickiness to make sure they all match up. Plus, there was one window that was a different size then the others. This made making the curtains harder but at the same time better because I could customize them. After sewing on the decorative piece and the front fabric to the black-out shade it was time to sew on the tube tape that makes the Roman shade work appropriately.

I pinned on all the strips at one time making sure all four curtains lined up so when they were opened they would be level.

Now it's time to get your handyman. I chose Sean for this (I could have done it myself but it makes him feel useful and manly!). Measure twice and cut once please! Speaking of...I asked him to cut the 60 yards of cording into 12 pieces. For those math whizzes out there that's 5 yards per piece (or 15 feet). I was busy tacking down some pieces and finishing up some other stuff with the curtains. I got up and headed to where he was cutting and found 5 feet strips of cording. I quickly told him to stop as those weren't even as long as the curtains. I was so afraid we weren't going to have enough cording now but we ended up measuring and making the pieces the necessary length and actually had some left over. We laughed pretty hard about this. His excuse? "You said 5 and the tape measure is in feet."

Yes people that's Sean using something other then a computer!

So the other thing I found out about my windows is they aren't square. I had to staple and restaple the fabric to the piece of wood so many times before I was finally pleased with how they were hanging (yes a little OCD there).

So the long awaited reveal!!! Here's what they look like all the way down.....

and in their up position.....

I really enjoyed sewing these and I'm already planning my next project. This is one of my goals for this year; to do more things I enjoy doing!