Curtains: A cautionary tale*

You may remember a time long, long ago when I was sewing curtains. No? Huh? You mean you don't file away all of my very mundane important activities for future reference? For shame.

Well, once upon a time, more than two years ago, I bought fabric for curtains. We needed window coverings for the open living room/dining room area and, because I am me, I had to sew them. The front window is huge, though, so it took months to find appropriately-sized curtain rods. Then it took more months to get Pottery Barn to send us all the rods in a matching and undamaged state. Oh, and they were a giant pain to install. It was rough.



So, finally, at the beginning of 2011, I started sewing curtains. I sewed up curtains for the little window in the living room. Then the huge window in the living room. Then I got distracted by having a baby. Then, when I was ready to get back into curtain sewing, I pulled out the remaining fabric and realized I had made a grave miscalculation somewhere along the line. I had a little window and a medium window left to sew for (both in the dining room)...and not enough fabric. Not nearly enough fabric. The cursing was intense, folks. There were tears.

We went back to the place we bought the fabric (Vogue in Evanston) but, being over a year later and all, they didn't have any left. I looked around at all the other area fabric stores and couldn't find it. Internet searching was useless because I knew nothing about the fabric (seriously, nothing: who made it? is that tan? taupe? what? is it linen? cotton? a blend?). So we gave up. We said we'd find another non-matching but sort-of-coordinating fabric for the dining area, but we kept not finding any. So we've had bare curtain rods over those windows for, uh, a while.

But! Yes, there is a "but"! A couple weekends ago I was at JoAnn Fabrics buying interfacing. Of course, any trip to the fabric store involves me aimlessly wandering through the aisles petting the fabric. As one does.

And! Suddenly! There it was! Our fabric! More than two years after the initial fabric purchase, and at a completely different store! I placed an emergency run-to-the-sewing-room-and-find-that-scrap-of-paper-I-scribbled-on call to Adam, who, amazingly enough, did find that scrap of paper. He told me how much fabric I needed, and I bought some fabric. And I am making some curtains.



Here's the new set for the small dining room window. Only the medium dining room window left to go!


*In case it's not clear, the moral to the story is to be careful with your measurements and purchase extra fabric. Or maybe it's to never give up? Although, reading back through this post, I'm thinking the cautionary tale should really be about not writing overly wordy posts about fairly tedious things. Hmmm.