Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Ruffly kitchen curtains!

I'm not craftsy. When I see how-to-make-curtains tutorials on blogs, I just get discouraged. If it weren't for my very creative big and my art-major little, I wouldn't have made it through Pi Phi big sis week. When I taught arts & crafts for a term at camp, all I could do was rinse paintbrushes and start lanyards. But I've always enjoyed craft projects, especially the very simple kind I can actually pull off. When I was little, I would hand-sew scraps of fabric into clothes for my bear and American Girl dolls. I imagined myself as a Laura Ingalls Wilder or even a Felicity Merriman. A month before my wedding, I helped my "other mother," Cyrene, make a lovely sundress that I wore to my rehearsal dinner. She did the vast majority of the work, but I pinned some hems and learned a lot about the process. Look how beautifully it turned out!

Here I am in my garnet & gold dress, surrounded by my beautiful bridesmaids!
With the dressmaking experience behind me and my lovely new sewing machine in front of me (a graduation present from my incredibly talented Auntie Flo!), I have embarked on a mission to make curtains for my cute little house.

I started with what I thought would be the simplest: short ruffly curtains for my kitchen windows. Our kitchen has two windows that look into a closed-in porch. You can see straight through the glass wall of that "Florida room," as it is apparently called, into the garden. I didn't want to block that view too much, but I wanted something that would frame the window and make the kitchen look a little more lived-in. These turned out to be very forgiving, which is wonderful for a novice sewer who is still working on sewing in a straight line. I think anyone who can figure out a sewing machine could probably make these.

I made the first curtain (above) on Thursday, before Andrew and I left for Mike & Kate's wedding. I made the second one today--it's a little shorter, since it's sitting above some potted plants. Or maybe just because I didn't measure well enough. Take your pick.

 If you're interested in making your own kitchen curtains (and you are, aren't you?), cut your fabric into a rectangle that is a couple inches wider and about 1/3 longer than you want your final product to be. Pin and hem the sides so it is more or less  the width you want. One of the things that has stuck with me from home ec class is that you sew a little back-and-forth business to cement the beginning and end of your thread. Go forward an inch or so, reverse and then full speed ahead. So do that... this time.

Next, fold down the top so that it is (allowing for the bottom hem, when we get there) the height you want your curtain to be. Pin it all the way across. Set your stitch length to the longest option and don't do the forward-reverse thing to cement your thread. Sew all the way across. Leave plenty of thread on both ends.


Now you're going to pull the ruffle. This is the part that takes a while, but it's pretty mindless. Put something good on TV (the Tsonga-Raonic match today was perfect) and just inch the fabric down along the thread. I switched between the top & bottom threads, as well as both sides, when the ruffle looked stuck. Go slowly and carefully so you don't break the thread.

This is what it looks like when you're getting started
This is what it looks like when you're done!
 Once you're done with the lower ruffle, use chalk to draw a line about halfway between the lower ruffle and the top. This line demarcates the upper limit of your curtain rod, so make sure to leave enough space. I worked in segments, since the ruffling makes it difficult to see what you're doing.

Sew along the chalk line just as you did for the first ruffle, and pull it through in the same way. I anchored my ruffle edges with the forward-reverse deal, just a couple inches on each side. Finally, pin and hem the bottom--it'll look like it's a little ruffled, too, which I think is nice.


And you're done! It's ready for hanging. I used suspension rods from Home Depot and a tall husband.

1 comment: