New drapes

These are not the new drapes. These are the old ones.

I made the drapes for my living room when we first moved into our house nearly 4 years ago .... and I hate them. OK .... I don't HATE them I just don't like them in the living room. OK I am probably just tired of them. I like the fabric and I like the way they let light into the room, but that's about it. I want something has has more color. We were originally going to build our house and sell it as a spec so everything I picked out had to be "user friendly" and neutral. Now I think I want something with a little more depth and color.

I am going to move them into the master bedroom and bathroom to let light in, but still give us some privacy. They will stay there until I decide to re-do that room as well ;) I heard that my favorite fabric store was having a blowout sale so I thought I would give myself a $100 allowance to re-do the living room drapes. That is not a lot of money to cover 3 large windows in top to bottom chenille, but I thought I would see if they had any good fabric that was on sale.

I made a tablecloth out of this beautiful fabric and I thought it would make beautiful drapes as well. I made it a few years ago, but they had more of it in stock. I thought it would be cool to match the tablecloth to the drapes so I bought out the 13.5 years that they had and got some green fabric to make a duster for the bottom. I spent a little more than I wanted (this seems to be my usual, but really I think it's because I under budget what I will need to spend in the first place), but I only spent $130. The awesome part is if I had bought that fabric at full price I would have literally spent $350! Go me!

I laid the fabric down in the living room and used the grout lines to make sure I was cutting it straight. 17 yards of fabric is no joke to cut. It took me over an hour just to cut it up!

The picture on the left is the back and the one on the right is the front. I LOVE that the fabric is double sided. That way when you look at it from the outside it still looks pretty and I don't have to sew extra fabric to make it look finished. Quite the money saver.

Before and after. The funny part about this picture (and NOT so funny at the same time) is I sewed the new panel UPSIDE-FREAKING-DOWN so I basically had to take it apart and do it again. SO aggravating, but it would have been more aggravating had I left it that way and not realized my mistake. I'm not totally sure there is a "right side up" in this fabric, but it looked upside down to me. I did one panel a day for 5 days. It took longer than I thought, but it was worth it. I thought I could get all of them sewn in 2 days, but even though it is just straight stitching it is still really time consuming.

All finished! Not perfect, but I think it is an improvement.

I haven't decided if the drapes and the table cloth are too "matchy matchy", but they are staying put for now regardless.