Curtains!

In August we moved into a 3 bedroom, bottom floor apartment. After a smoke smell just wouldn't go away, we decided to try to get into a different apartment in the same complex. With a little more thought, we decided that a 2 bedroom would suit us just fine. In December, we were able to move into a 2 bedroom middle floor apartment and are just loving it! 

There is quite a difference between the windows of the bottom floor and the windows of the middle floor. The windows on the bottom floor start half-way up the wall, go all the way up and are across the whole room. The windows in our new apartment are on one side of the room and go floor to ceiling. 

The curtains I was planning on using were ones that we have had for a couple of years. They are brown shear curtains, more for decoration than covering. They worked great on all of the windows up until these ones, and I knew I was going to need to adjust them if I wanted them to work. 

Since we only have one long window in our room, we only needed one long curtain. My original plan was to just sew the two shorter curtains together. After looking at them, I realized that if I did that, there would be a large darker line across the middle. (The more times you fold a shear fabric over itself, the less shear and the darker it becomes).

I didn't want them to look terrible, and I had extra length to play with so I decided to add some ruffles to hide the dark middle line. I laid the curtains down on the floor and began to pin ruffles in. I adjusted a few times to get the overall length to what I needed. I pinned about 5 pins across each ruffle. 

I picked up the curtains to take them to my sewing machine. When I did that, in between each pin fell down a little bit and I liked it even more than the previous ruffles! So I just decided to sew a little line where each pin was and it worked. 

I also didn't want completely sheer curtains and looking through my fabric stash I found a dark brown piece of fabric that was the exact size of the curtains! That was awesome. So I sewed a line across the top to line them and hung them up!

From the other corner of our room:

Close up:

 If we want some light to come in, but don't want to have our curtains opened all the way, we use a ribbon to tie the lining back:

 And sometimes we open them all the way!

I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. Right now, we are all about making things work without spending any extra money if we can. With these curtains, we made it work.

~K.A.N.