House-pride: STOP!............ Curtain-time!

So, it's been awhile, huh? I never meant to fall off Planet Blogosphere for the summer, but with the hubs and I both having a ton of extra free time, we got stuff DONE around here. Like, we have house-pride now. Huzzah!

So here is the first in a little house pride mini-series that will be coming your way just for funsies.

When we moved into our house we kept the ugly-arsed, plastic, cheap, yellow blinds up, just so we wouldn't have to buy any for a while. Now back track to when our house was literally falling in on itself, when it had to have walls rebuilt, got drywalled, and then painted.

Remember this?

Well, we picked out pure white for all our walls but two. We did an accent wall in the room above a dark "elephant-y" gray, and a wall in the other room a bright dandelion yellow (you'll see shortly). Suddenly, the crappy blinds weren't cutting it anymore. So we went fabric shopping. Multiple times.

Now, instead of falling apart, with those ugly blinds like above (well okay, those ones are still there, but in the dining room we had the exact same blinds), we now have this:

Do you like my art? :)

I bought some outdoor patio fabric that was on sale at Fabricland buy one, get two free. I had to carefully pre-wash the fabric (it more or less said to spot treat only), because when I held it up to my white walls before washing to get an idea of what the curtains were going to look like, the black fabric left smudges on my walls.    : |   Not impressed.

I also picked up some blackout lining at 50% off, not because I want my dining room to be dark, but because the blackout lining acts as an insulator, keeping the heat out in the summer during the day (we don't have A/C), and the cold out in the winter at night, that way our furnace can be more efficient. Yay for being a treehugger! :)

The back of the curtain.

I used this awesome tutorial from Design Sponge, except I did not pleat the top of my curtains (I didn't think they had the pleating tape in store, but on my last trip I found it so I think I might try for my next set in the living room). Instead, I doubled the fabric up at the top, top-stitched the very top, and just used some drapery pins.

I used some super thick thread to hold it all together, and I put in the weights at the bottom corners of the curtains, like in the tutorial, even though the fabric is so heavy I'm not sure it needed them.

Overall, I have to say I really pleased with myself! They took two days to complete, one day per curtain, but the second curtain came together much quicker than the first. Also, my math got better on the second one. I accidentally forgot to add in some allowance on the first one, and well, my lining is about six inches too short. Not really a big deal because you can't see it from outside. Now I only have 8 more windows to go!

Have you ever sewn anything for your house?

{STOP!}