New curtains!

Originally uploaded by sldownard.

It seems like every weekend, lately, I have to have a new home improvement project. Cleaning the office, rearranging the living room, building new shelves in the kitchen, whatever. This weekend’s project was hanging some new curtains that I bought earlier in the week, on sale.

The curtains are burgundy jacquard, with a tasseled pointy thingy at the top (hey, I’m not a curtain designer, cut me some slack). They’re long enough to reach the bottom of the windows; short enough that Kiyoshi shouldn’t try climbing them. Hopefully. They’re just on an ordinary adjustable-width aluminum tubular rod. And if I ever get the trim in there painted, they’ll match it!

The blue cloth is out of my fabric stash – 45″ wide sheer stuff in a royal blue shade. I had purple in there too, but not enough to stretch the entire width of the window. It’s folded in half, tacked together along the selvedges, and hung tightly across the top, then gathered on the edges to form the curve. For some reason (that only my landlord understands, I’m sure) my blinds don’t actually go all the way to the top of my windows — there’s about an 18″ gap between the top of the blinds and the top of the windows. It has always, always bugged me, so that’s why I decided I needed curtains, but when I gathered the curtains up, to allow light in, they still disclosed the blinds’ gap a little bit. So that’s why I grabbed the blue sheer stuff and made my little quasi-valance.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with them. Not bad for $40!