Crafter by Night

The Living Room

Here at chez Miriam, it is time once again to consider the living areas of the house and to make improvements. Over the weekend I made one huge improvement: curtains!

I’m a big fan of curtains. Over the last years of my life I have lived in many a drab and dreary apartment, and 99.99% of the time I’ve have had to deal with super-cheap vertical and horizontal blinds. These do not improve the character of said apartment any more than plain white semi-gloss walls do.

So I use curtains to add color, life and interest to my rooms. It’s about as cheap as paint if you do it right. You don’t have to make really complicated Roman blinds – simple is often great. With just a little work you can make a really big statement with color, pattern and texture.

I’m a big fan of simplicity, so my curtains rarely feature pattern or swoopy bits or anything fussy. I’m right next door to minimalism, truly.

The living room is brown and red. Next spring I will be converting to a different color scheme, swapping the reds for cool blues and a bit of bright green. I like change, so I have neutral browns everywhere, which I find comforting. Then in autumn I go over to deep reds and other autumny colors. And spring and summer get cool shades.

I bought the white lace ones in back. It’s a really neat pattern, sort of reminds me of Spanish decorative patterns from the era of the caliphs.

The brown and red are bed sheets. I love bed sheets. They’re great for sleeping, of course, but did you know they’re also often the cheapest kind of large, unbroken length of cloth you can purchase? If you go to an online merchant like Overstock.com you can often find sheets with a really high thread count, even neat patterns for very little. As the picture shows, the ones I used had a very high sheen that resembles silk. I use sheets for curtains and as quilt backing in particular. I don’t want to sew together multiple panels of cloth for these items, as I think it looks bad. And in the case of quilting, a seam against you at night isn’t that great.

I chose not to do a curtain with backing, as I wanted to let the lace show through and let in more light. However, just sew two bedsheets together if you want backing – you can do white, or just two of the same color, or whatever you wish. You can even make them reversible. If you want to do this, that’s your first step.

Since I wanted just one layer, first I did a foldover on one end that could serve as a plain rod pocket first. This allows me to measure for hemming length, and it also gives me the option of switching the look a bit if I get tired of the hidden tabs I’ll put on later. I hung them on the rod, and measured them for length.

When hemmed properly, these curtains sweep the floor and have a nice full, thick, posh feel to them. This is achieved by double-thick 4″ hems on the bottoms for weight and drape. They’re also ironed and starched – this gives them sheen and additional presence.

On the top I chose to do hidden tabs. The top rod pocket and tabs are 3″ long and the tabs are 2.5″ wide. I took material leftover from hemming the bottom and sewed up the edges, then turned them inside out so no raw edges show. Then I sewed them every 6″ along the back. In order to avoid having short sewing lines that would call attention to otherwise-hidden tabs, I sewed the entire width of the curtain. On the bottom of the tabs, this means mimicking the sewing line from the rod pocket exactly. This is probably the hardest part.

Also, don’t sew the tabs on the sides on either end like I did. I finished with the top, turned, went down the side and then turned again and went back along the bottom. That was just lazy. However, you cannot put a curtain rod through a sewn seam.

So after one last trip up the stairs for the seam ripper, everything got put up. I like.