This is the question I posed myself. Being a fairly experienced sewer, I suspected the answer would be - straight forward, but not without its challenges.
Conclusion number one:
What curtain sewing is not - sewing miles and miles of boring straight seams. It's actually not that easy.
Conclusion number two:
What curtain sewing is: very precise work. As I found when I sewed the seams sometimes with the lining on the top side, sometimes underneath. The thermadrape lining tended to stick to the feed-dogs causing itself to gather in to the outer fabric. Well the curtains just won't hang that straight if the lining is pulling them off grain.
There's loving hands at home and then there's just bloody awful. I could not leave the edges looking that wonky. So there was the gentle sound of unpicking and resewing to be heard in our house this afternoon. But no swearing, either I am now too accepting of "what is" or more likely, simply expecting large amounts of resewing to be part of the creative deal - like Karl Largerfeld and his frequent liaisons with a ginormous rubbish bin, nothing ever goes that smoothly.
These curtains are for my son's bedroom. They are a beautiful burnt orange linen/viscose fabric from Nicks where I got them for $10 per metre. I lined them with blackout lining because he's still young enough to think dawn is the time to get up, but with the idea that when he's a teenager and won't get out of bed before midday I can whip them out and the sunrise will blaze him out of bed.
I can't show you more exciting pictures yet of his room because it is still under going transformation - and that transformation will be slow, because the cost of the renovation has cauterized our spending capacity.
I must say I did enjoy the challenge of forced thriftiness as I channelled my late father this week by rescuing two perfectly good cushions from the skip down the road. Polyester fill, not my favourite, they will break down, but not yet, and until then I can make the cushions to bring together the orange of the curtains and the bright green of the walls.
I have been reading design books to get ideas about how to decorate our house. Check out this quote from Farrow and Ball, Living with Colour:
Fans of Farrow and Ball come in all shapes and sizes - Jo Berryman is a particularly glamourous version. Young, extremely pretty and formerly married to the bassist of a super group, she has worked her way through fashion styling on magazines....
Did you stop dead in your tracks at that? I quickly checked the publication date. 2010. Yes that's right. In 2010, a successful business woman is first defined by her level of attractiveness and then by her (ex)husband's job.
So much for progress.
At least my curtains are coming along.
