Sew Excited
Twenty Yards O’ Fabric
That’s how many yards I knew I’d need to make eight living room curtains. It generally breaks down to five yards of fabric per window (or sliding door) for two floor-length curtains that I can hang high and wide over each one. So five yards times four windows/sliders = eight panels (two for the big back window, two for each of the two sliding doors to the right as you face the window, and two for the sliding door to the left (that leads out onto this balcony to nowhere). So that’s where the whole 20 yards thing came from. And yeah for those who can’t picture it, that’s a lot of fabric (60 feet of it to be exact). Even at a great price of oh let’s say seven dollars a yard it would have been $140 (not including curtain rods, etc). And it’s hard to find extra wide upholstery fabric for under $15 or so a yard (which is what we usually like to use), and that would add up to a heart-stopping $300 price tag).
Eeeks, eh? (<– that’s my Canadian impression). Anyway, so that’s probably the reason our living room sliders have sat around naked for over six months.
Oh yeah, and those pom-poms from Clara’s party hung around in the sunroom until this weekend when we finally decided to retire them to the playroom. Anyway, back to the curtains (or lack there-of). Originally we thought we wanted something bright and bold for the fabric. Just because we’re having so much fun with color in this house and also because the walls are soft gray, the beams are darker gray, and the sofa is also dark gray. We had a whole lotta gray going on so we thought some bold textile might break things up. But then we tossed up some bright place-holder $5 art (made here) and got Kermit (our big green cushy wool shag) and mixed in some brightly colored pillows, and brought in two big gleaming silver lamps on the back of the console that we built, and – can you see where I’m going with this? – we stepped back and realized we no longer wanted bright curtains.
Our big bright green rug was enough pop o’ color for us (and the bright art might get adapted but the tones will probably stay) so after our little course correction when it came to our fabric hunt we landed here: something with tone on tone texture. Not too bright. And not too expensive.
Then we realized that we had grabbed some fun tone on tone leafy guys from Ikea a few months back (they were on sale for $29 a pair, down from $49, so we tossed two packs into our cart with intentions of hanging them in the playroom someday). So since we already had four out of eight (and they worked out to be just $15 a panel) if we hung the four that we owned and liked them, we figured we could just head back to Ikea and grab two more packs and be done-zo. No more nekkid windows. So we grabbed some oil-rubbed bronze curtains and ring hooks from Target and hung our four panels on the two sliding doors on that right wall. And we liked it. Obviously they needed to be ironed and hemmed, but we loved the sweet and soft leafy sophistication that they layered in. Especially at $15 a panel. Sold. Just needed two more two-packs.
We miraculously heard that John’s mom would be up near Ikea the next day so we begged her to stop in and pick up two more packs for us. Before she left I popped over to ikea.com to find out their names for her. I like to play a game where I make up an Ikea-ish sounding product name to see how close I am to the actual product name (I’m never even close but it keeps me entertained) so I came up with Vika Lund and Skiv Rast as I searched. And searched. And that was the first sign that something tragic was about to happen. They weren’t online anymore. Nowhere to be found. That little know-it-all voice in the back of my head whispered: “They stopped selling them- you almost solved the naked living room window problem but you didn’t buy enough packs and now they’re gone. You lose.” But I’ve seen other things in the store that aren’t online (a bunch of rugs and mirrors for example) so I tried to convince myself that they were just were among the other in-store-but-not-online items.
About twenty four hours later we got the call I had been dreading. John’s mom was standing in the curtain aisle after asking a sweet guy about them and he confirmed they had in fact been discontinued. Hadn’t been sold since April. As the Brits say: majah bummah.
Of course that spurred on a marathon ebay/craigslist/google hunt for any and all available identical curtain packs. I turned up a few two paneled packs for around $75 a pop, but that hardly seemed reasonable when we paid $29 (they’re called Alvine Kottar by the way). So I gave myself permission to mope around and drown my sorrows in Oreos after throwing myself on the floor and telling John that the living room curtains would be the death of me. You know, totally normal behavior for a 29 year old.
Then as I was sitting on the sofa with Oreo crumbs all over my chest and lap (you’re welcome for that mental image), my eyes kept wandering over to the four panels that we had already hung. My one beef with them was that they were too bunchy. Too wide. All ganked up. See? Note: This is a terribly lit shot – sorry. I was too depressed to check my settings.
Yup, slowly it dawned on me. They were waaaay too wide. Especially since we’re not curtain closers so we always have them thrown open to let in maximum light (that area of our house is wooded and fenced so there’s not a privacy issue anyway). This next thought had me getting a wee bit excited. Picture my pace quickening and my chest rising and falling a little faster (just enough to make those Orea cookie crumbs do a little happy dance). What if I cut them down the middle thereby creating eight curtain panels from my four too-wide ones? Oh man, that would be sweet. The excitement was quickly followed by my good ol’ inner Debbie Downer voice saying: “But what if they look too skinny and you ruin them? Then you can’t even use them in the playroom because they’d be lame little slivers of fabric. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Darn that evil inner voice. She was right about Ikea no longer selling my curtains. Cue more Oreo eating. Then it dawned on me that I could test-drive the half-width by just unclipping them from my ring hooks and folding them in half and rehanging them. That would “simulate” the width that they’d be if I snipped and hemmed them without picking up the scissors (give or take an inch for the new hem). So I ate brushed the crumbs off of myself and gingerly got off the sofa to try it. Lo and behold, they looked pretty darn good. Not super full and mondo wide, but I didn’t like them that way to begin with (remember the word ganked came to mind?). And since they’d never be drawn and would always be smashed all the way open to let in light (and facilitate sliding door function) it was the perfect solution for us because we wouldn’t want anything much fuller anyway (which would just get in the way). And you’d see more of the pretty leafy pattern instead of ten million folds. Done deal.
Out came my neurotic “no John cuts” fabric scissors (more on those here) and I snipped those babies right up the middle. The best thing about the cutting-in-half process was that they had been perfectly folded in the packaging right down the middle, so they still had a center fold that I could just follow down with the scissors to end up with two exactly-the-same-size panels. Then I just hemmed them with my trusty iron + sewing machine technique (no pins required – yay Team Lazy). More on that here. Oh and this time I actually folded over and ironed the hem twice before sewing the hem (last time I folded it over once with the iron and then folded it again on the sewing machine as I stitched).
I must admit that ironing down that second fold made it even easier to slide through my sewing machine. So hemming the sides of all eight panels probably took twenty minutes (once they were all prepped with the iron, which probably took thirty).
Then after stitching that 1/2″ side hem (which looked exactly the same as the Ikea-made hem on the other side of each panel – thank goodness they didn’t do anything too fancy that I couldn’t replicate) I tossed them into the wash on cold (and then tumble dry lowed them) to pre-shrink ‘em before hanging & pinning the bottoms.
I grabbed them right out of the dryer (they were still a little damp, but hanging them that way kept them from getting even more wrinkly from sitting in the dryer) and clipped them all up on the four oil-rubbed curtain rods (from Target, along with the ring clips) which we hung 14″ wider than the trim around the sliding doors and the window. Except for the sliders leading to the balcony to nowhere (there wasn’t as much wall space to go as wide on those, so we went 8″ wide on each of those). As for the distance down from the crown molding, we went with three inches so all of the rods would hang at the same height. That felt high enough to draw the eye up without completely crowding the dark beams above. You know I love a good oil-rubbed bronze rod hung high and wide like dark eyeliner on a window. Me-ow.
Then I pinned the bottoms of each panel so they’d just graze the floor…
… and hemmed those bottoms pretty quickly (I gave them a longer base hem since a few folks told us that nice drapes have 3-4″ base hems – yay Team Fancy). Oh but I used iron-on hem tape for the bottoms because I was tired and wanted the thick 4″ hem on each one to be uninterrupted by thread that you can see from the front (I’m still very very not-sewing-machine wise, so I couldn’t figure out how to get such a thick hem without seeing a telltale line of stitching 4″ off the bottom of the panel which I thought would interrupt the flow of the panel). I guess I could have tried to hand stitch them from the back so you couldn’t see it from the front, but I’m not so good at that whole thing. But the hem tape worked like a charm and I ended up with nice extra wide bottom hems in around a half an hour. I even hemmed them right from the rod (as they hung there after pinning them). Didn’t even unclip them and rehang ‘em. Yay Team Lazy.
As for the curtain length, we definitely didn’t want our panels extra long and puddled since two of the three sliders are used often and we didn’t want the fabric to get all grungy (even though they hang to the side and aren’t in the path of anyone walking, we worried if they were too long they could drift underfoot).
Anyway, enough chitchat. Here they be:
I should mention that sometimes bright sun + window = blown out curtains. Oops. But in person you can see the leafy goodness from across the room, even on a sunny day. And as that over the top dude on Million Dollar Decorators says in his intro: it’s delicious.
Like this:
Only further away (so the leaves look smaller). Ok, now I’m giving you a little primer on perspective. Somebody slap me.
Oh but you can see the lesser-pictured sliders on the left side in the photo above (the ones that lead out to that odd patio that we someday want to revamp).
Who noticed that Burger literally gets up and repositions himself to face the camera? Diva much?
We love how the sweetness of the almost sheer-like curtains contrast the big chunky rustic-ish wood console we built:
And they play so nicely with the big round mirror too:
It was fun to add in a few pops of blue thanks to the hydrangeas from our patio and two awesome blue decorating books that I love: Domino and Decorate (the latter of which is Holly Becker’s new book that I got on Amazon – it’s great).
Hydrangeas = so pretty. But also pretty quick to wilt. I clipped these guys five days ago and some of them already look kind of… spent. Oh well. At least they were free.
See the curtains in the background of the pic above? That’s pretty much how they look from across the room in real life (the sunlight just blows them out in photos so they’re harder to read in the wide shots in this post).
Oooh artsy. Hydrangeas in the mirror:
Here’s Burg-dorf Goodman posing again. And here’s another shot of the lesser-pictured slider across from the two that lead out to the patio/sunroom on the other side of the living room. I love how the soft tone-on-tone curtains don’t steal too much attention from the frame wall nearby. They play well with others.
Oh and did you notice I had some fun switching up the pillows. Zero dollars spent (and proof that I have too many pillows). Pillows are like nomads in our house – they never live in one spot for long. These guys were all in the playroom and the sunroom (originally from Bed Bath & Beyond on clearance) except for the floofy one in the middle (which was originally from Target but has lived in our bedroom for a while) so I brought them out for more of that fun texture-y, layered, tone-on-tone thing.
Now the room is a nice little blend of happy (the shaggy green rug and the bright art that we might just switch up soon) + contrast (the dark sofa, the gray-washed beams, the chunky console, and the oil-rubbed bronze mirror) + softness (the faux sheepskin, the white frames, the white desk, the patterned curtains, the lighter toned pillows). Although I’m pretty sure those pillows will continue to get swapped around (Sue the Pillow and her bright friends are now living in the adjoined sunroom, so I can still see them from the sofa). And when we get around to building/refurbishing a media cabinet and refinishing the floors we’ll really be in business in here. Someday…
Let’s wrap this baby up. We love them. They’re our cup of tea. They add come-on-in-and-flop-down-on-the-sofa-and-eat-Oreos ambiance. And they were just $58 for four curtain panels (that we sliced up the middle to make eight). Which breaks down to $7.25 a panel. Which would mean that we’d have to find fabric that was $1.45 per yard to get this good of a deal if we were to make them from scratch. Pretty crazy how things work out, huh? Wait, I guess if we knew we could have cut our fabric in half (we wouldn’t recommend doing that unless it’s a really wide bolt, like 60″ or more, and you’re certain you won’t want to draw them for privacy) we only would have needed to find $2.90 a yard fabric. That’s still pretty tough though.
One thing’s for sure. This room has definitely evolved over the past six months. Here’s what it looked like when we moved in:
Yowsa. So yeah, we’re thanking the curtain powers that be. The only real bummer is the fact that cutting, ironing, hemming, and hanging my curtains probably only burned about one tenth of the calories from the curtain-drama-related cookie binge that ensued. Oh yeah, and it’s impossible to photograph how cozy this room feels (maybe because it’s so big it looks less inviting than it feels in real life?). Annoying. Anyway, here she blows at night. All glow-y thanks to the lamps:
And that brings us to 2,762 words on our living room curtains. Who do I think I am? I’m calling it. Have you guys ever split curtains up the middle or added extra length to them with banding at the bottom or top? Ever heard of Ikea selling out of things in April? Seems like a random month to decide not to bring stuff back, right? But maybe that’s why the panels we grabbed were on sale for $29 in the first place…
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My Babies
Our recent road trip to see Katie and her amazing house gave us that tickle to get down to business when we got back home. You know how your DIY momentum is up and you’re moving right along ticking things off your to-do list and then the dust clears and you’re just spent and need a little break? Like, mehaps, a road trip? That seems to be the way it goes with us. When it comes to house progress, we tend to work in fits and starts. But then something sparks that get-back-to-business excitement and suddenly we’re done with our four-ish day Hammer And Paint Brush Hiatus and are refreshed and ready to go. Yeah, so that happened.
I guess being on the road produced that absence makes the heart grow fonder effect. Not that we were mad at our house, but we just weren’t raring to go when we left like we were when we got back. So the morning after our 9.5 hour drive I woke up early, sorted through a million (ok, a thousand) photos, wrote that shopping post that went up in the afternoon, caught up on comments/Facebook/Twitter/email, wrote this house crashing post for the next morning, and then it was dinnertime. Then I up and made dining room curtains. And they might just be my favorite things in the whole darn house.
Seriously, you guys know we’re into our hallway frame gallery a little too much (along with our giant bedroom light fixture and humongous gray sectional). And I adore my weird horse art and miscellaneous ceramic animal menagerie. But you’d think I carried these curtains for nine months and went through 48 hours of labor to bring them into this world – that’s how much I love them. And it only took me about an hour and a half – two tops – to make them. Wham, bam, thank you Katie (for the kick-in-the-pants inspiration that your gorgeous house provided).
Here’s how it all went down. We already mentioned snagging this deeply discounted curtain fabric from a local fabric outlet called U-Fab (for anyone looking for it by name, it’s “Robert Allen’s Khanjali Peacock” so googling that hopefully turns up some of your own). It was fancy schmancy designer fabric that I’d been in love with forever, but it was marked down to $12.99 a yard (as opposed to the original cost of $40+ a yard!) thanks to a bit of an irregularity in the fabric (a white stripe that ran down one side, which I knew I could work around).
Since I wanted two 90-ish inch panels for either side of the big picture window in the dining room I calculated that five yards would do the trick, which factored out to $32 a panel (still not dirt cheap but a whole lot cheaper than the regular price of that fabric, which would have run me $100 a panel). Score.
We’re just not really curtain closing and opening folks (except in the nursery since we close the blinds and draw the curtains – anything for five more minutes of sleep) so we don’t plan to draw them shut (we add white faux wood blinds or bamboo shades when it comes to actually gaining privacy, although since we usually hang out in the back of the house when it’s dark enough to see into the windows, we’re not in any rush to add privacy blinds or shades just yet). But we do love hanging curtains high and wide to let the light stream in and add height and drama. Which means we didn’t have to worry about the width (since we’d need a lot more of that than what we had to cover the long picture window). And boy are these babies a fresh little slap in the face compared to the white Ikea Vivan curtains that we embraced in nearly every room of our last house.
But on to how I made them. First I rolled out the fabric on a 5 x 8′ rug in our office (one of my completely not patented ways to get straight cuts since you can line up the fabric with the corners/edges of the rug to be sure it’s square before snipping away). Then I just pulled out my tape measure to see how long I wanted them (90″ each before hem allowances, which would make them about 87″ long after hemming – but then I add ring hooks which make them 90″ again):
It was as simple as lining up the end of the fabric with the 90″ mark on my tape measure and then cutting the other edge against the rug at the 0″ inch mark, for a nice straight cut (sure enough, I was left with a nice 90″ long rectangular swatch of fabric).
When it comes to the width, I just usually go with the width that it comes right off the bolt (which is wider when you get upholster fabric like this- ours was 57″). But remember it had that defect running along one side of it, so I just cut three inches or so from that side (again I used the edge of the rug to get a straight cut). But I didn’t completely cut off the white part since I knew once I hemmed it, it would be completely invisible (even from the back). You can see the normal white edge that comes on fabric on the right of the swatch below and the irregular white defect on the bottom half of the left edge below:
So there I had one 90 x 54″ curtain panel cut out, and just needed one for the other side of the window. So I laid the freshly cut one on top of the uncut remnant of fabric and used it as a template to create another panel of exactly the same size:
Then I washed both curtain panels so they would be “pre-shrunk” and easy to launder from here on out (one of our main goals is to have as many “washable” surfaces in the kitchen and dining room as possible). Oh but it’s always smartest to preshrink fabric before you cut it, I just knew I only had enough fabric to make two panels of this size so whether I washed or cut it first (or cut and washed it later) I’d end up with the same sized panels in the end. I grabbed them fresh out of the dryer instead of letting them sit there to keep them wrinkle free for the most part.
Next I had to decide between my trusty curtain-making method of using iron-on hem tape or the slightly scary idea of using Oh Brother (my new sewing machine) to attempt to do what I used to use hem tape for. After a decent amount of out-loud debate with myself, I decided to try my hand at sewing curtain panels- just to see if I could do it (but you can find full curtain making tutorials with hem tape here and here). Even without my hem-tape security blanket, I did break out the iron to make a half inch “seam” down one of the short sides of the curtain. It just seems like now whenever I dabble in sewing, I find myself trying to iron instead of pinning – just to see if it’ll work. Am I a rebel or what?
The ironed seam definitely stayed put while I dragged the giant fabric swatch back into the kitchen to sew the hem, so I happily skipped the pinning step and even boldly (well, maybe that adjective is a stretch) decided to try another hemming technique that some of you have commented to tell me about in previous I’m-a-shaky-little-sewing-novice posts. I took the ironed seam and folded it over one more time, then I sewed down the seam to create a nice finished looking hem (even from the back). That extra fold hid the raw cut edge of the fabric, if that makes sense. And even with my extra folding step, there was thankfully no pinning required. Sweet.
See, here’s what it looked like completely folded over as I sewed down the seam.
And this method surprisingly worked on all sides (I worried the long 90″ sides of the panels wouldn’t take to ironing and would need to be pinned, but it went just as well as the short sides). And as for the defect, you can see how when I folded the hem over one more time, it became invisible and I was once again left with a finished looking edge from both the front and the back.
Here’s how the back of a corner looked once I was done with my quickie ironing-then-folding-then-hemming technique:
Then I clipped seven oil-rubbed bronze ring clips to each panel (from Target) and slipped them onto a super long oil-rubbed bronze rod. Oh how I love not having to sew a rod pocket or anything complicated thanks to the magic of ring clips. I ended up getting the curtain rod from Lowe’s since the ones at Target weren’t long enough – I ended up needing 144″ of length (that’s what she said).
Our curtain hanging method (also not patented or even endorsed) is for one of us to then stand on a chair (in this case, John) while the other one steps back and looks at the length of the curtains and how they hit the floor while the chair-stander raises and lowers the rod ever so slightly until the floor-stander screams “perfect- don’t move an inch or I’ll kill you” and then runs up to hold a rod bracket under the perfectly held rod to measure the distance from the crown molding or ceiling that it should be hung to keep the rod right where it’s being held.
Of course this only deals with the height of the rod and not the width, but we typically like to go as wide as we can with the curtains so they drape in front of the wall instead of blocking light and hanging in front of the window. In this case we went as wide as our extra long rod allowed (19″ outside of the window molding on each side). See how the panel just kisses the window and blocks wall instead of light?
Oh and notice how the curtain also seems to just graze the floor ever so slightly? Poor John raised and lowered the curtain on that chair fifteen times until it was juuuust right. We’ve tried measuring the wall or the panel instead of doing the by-eye real-test (involving two people, a chair, and some serious arm strength and balancing skillz) but you just can’t beat the result. At least we can’t. So we keep going back to it. And I tell John he’s my Atlas when he’s up there holding the rod up. Gotta keep team morale up.
Here’s another rod shot for you. You can also see how the curtains just hang slightly in front of the window trim here as opposed to blocking the whole side window, which is only 20″ wide. Since we mentioned that we hung the panels 19″ wide on each side of the window trim, you can totally see how if they were hung flush with the trim they would block all but one inch of that 20″ side window. Which is definitely not what we were going for.
You’ll have to excuse all of the wide shots of the room in this post. Things like the curtains and the room in general are coming off greener/yellower than they are in real life (the green grass/trees/bushes outside were casting a yellow-green tint through the big light-filled window, and I was too lazy to photoshop it). John will definitely be in charge of photos of this room next time around. As for the true color of the curtains, it’s best depicted in the closer shots without a lot of window going on, like the ones above.
Actually this shot is probably the most accurate to what they look like in real life. I’d describe them as mostly blue with hits of green, chartreuse, white, and brown. Crazy busy but also crazy gorgeous if you’re me (and miracle of all miracles, John loves them too). Who ever would have thought that two white curtain fiends like us could branch out and embrace curtain color and pattern? I wonder if my mom will like these or they’ll finally be a choice that she won’t endorse. What say you, mom?
Here’s another wide shot where they look more yellow/green than they really do in real life (they’re more like a teal blue color when you glance at them from afar) but you get the idea. Oh and the dark rod ties into the other deep tones in the room (the chair legs and dark dining table, the deep color on the back of the built-ins, etc). So that’s why I chose it over stainless or white. I always think a dark rod hung high and wide is like eyeliner on a window.
Mmmm, here’s a good shot of my favorite detail in the fabric. See those smeary turquoise blobs? They tie so deliciously into the slightly darker teal on the back of the built-ins. Yummy. Even the little yellow-green knobs that we added to the base cabinets of the built-ins relate perfectly to the pops of bright yellowy-green chartreuse in the curtains. Hooray for happy accidents like that (we had no idea what curtain fabric we’d pick when we snagged those babies at Hobby Lobby).
Oh yeah and I had some fun setting the table. Not that anyone’s coming over today. Or tomorrow. I just wanted to pull out a runner and some plates and cups and clip some random branches from outside. Why? I don’t know. Why do birds sing? I guess the colorful curtains got me hot and bothered enough to break out Sue the Napkin (times seven) and add some fun to the big empty wood table.
And guess what? I’m leaving everything there tonight. Just because I’m weird and I can’t wait to wake up in and morning and pad in there and smile. Kind of like how I paint a room and the next morning I run in and look at it again. Just grinning at the wall like a fool.
Isn’t it amazing how much of a difference curtains can make? Well, that and some rich color on the back of those built-ins. Here’s a little flash back to the room as it looked when we moved in:
And here it is now (albeit a little side-heavy with that bare wall on the left- for now):
Thought I was done? Nope. One more thing. Here’s a terribly rendered depiction of the doorway that we can’t wait to add that will connect the dining room to the kitchen (we plan to mirror the size of the picture window so the whole room feels nice and balanced). And of course adding a big chandelier over our giant table will add a lot more function (the room doesn’t have any ceiling fixtures!):
It’s so funny to remember that this room was a formal living room when we toured this house (and the office was the dining room). In fact we dug up these old shots that we took during our first walk through:
Gosh, that feels like a million years ago and it was less than six months back. As soon as we walked in we were struck by three things: we reeeally wanted the house, we wanted to change up a few of the rooms, and we reeeeally wanted the house. Yup, we were sold upon entry. I don’t think we ever got into the specifics, but the sellers weren’t 99% sure they even wanted to sell. In fact the night after we walked through the house for the first time they took their stuff out of storage. A sure sign to the realtor that they might take it off the market. Thank goodness it all worked out and they ended up accepting our offer.
As for looking past the way a room looks when you’re house hunting to see “the real space” we just completely discount furnishings and wallpaper and paint color and even entire room functions. That’s how we could look past the dining table and the sofa to almost immediately proclaim that converting the dining room into an office and turning the living room into a big spacious dining room would work more for the way we live. You know, since we have a huge family that we couldn’t cram into the former dining room, a giant living room in the back of the house (no need for two), and a penchant for open living and big wiiiide doorways. We just can’t help ourselves. Anyway, have you guys made any curtains lately? Knocked down any walls? Set the table for nothing but kicks?
Pssst- Soooo not a sewing person? I wasn’t either. Here’s a tutorial for making no-sew curtains with iron-on hem tape (and here’s another one for good measure).
I’m not a runner. But I can make one.
I used to run track and cross country in middle school and high school. I actually ran a 5:09 mile once (with the help of some downhill portions of a course and the fact that I was like 80 lbs). It happened once and never again (I usually clocked in between 6:20 and 7:10). But those days are gone (due partially to an ankle injury but mostly to laziness). Now I only run when I’m being chased. Or when I lose track of the baby. But making a runner? That I can do. You guys actually got a sneak peek of my recent runner creation in this picture from Clara’s party:
And let me tell you, it was child’s play compared to my big quilt project (nothing like a little confidence-building quick & easy sewing project to get your sew-mentum up). Yes, I just made a sewing pun for my mom. Happy birthday Momma (it’s tomorrow)! Anyway, here’s how it went. First I sorted through all of the leftover fabrics from Clara’s weekly photo project and picked four that I liked together (for a sort of cheerful and happy-go-lucky mixed & matched effect).
Then I found a runner that I already owned (from Target a while back) and folded it into quarters so I would have an idea of the size of each of the four squares of fabric that I should cut out (so that when sewn together they would equal the approximate width and length of the runner that I already had). I left about an inch of overhang on all sides to account for seams, so it looked a little something like this:
And for some reason I like to over-share, so I’ll point out how insane I am about my “good scissors.” I actually wrote this message on them with Sharpie because I was sick of John using the good sharp ones to do something crazy like trim a thick branch outside or slice open some crazy-thick plastic package. Do you like how it specifically says “no John cuts”? I think it’s hilarious. That’s like Kate Gosselin level micro-managing right there. But it works. John won’t touch these scissors anymore. And I love you for that babe.
Anyway, next I ironed all of my four fabric rectangles so they weren’t all junky and wrinkled looking (they were already washed, btw, which is important to combat shrinkage – because nobody likes shrinkage).
Then I pinned each section together with the bad side facing out (which would create invisible seams – which are my favorite since they’re harder to mess up). Oh and to all of those who gave me the tip about pinning it perpendicular- I love it. I just somehow forgot so I’ll have to try that next time.
With it all pinned together it looked a little questionable for a while, but I (surprisingly) had faith that when I ironed and sewed those seams they’d look a lot less ganked up then they looked at the pinning stage of the game:
And sure enough, after a little bit of sewing things were looking a lot more promising. Who ever would have thought that me + sewing machine = something looking better than it did before. I’m telling you, this is serious growth for me as a person. I would have defined my relationship with sewing machines as tumultuous before this month. But times they are a changing. I might even have a tiny crush on Oh Brother.
Anyway, then it was time to iron down those seams from the back so they would lay nice and flat and look good from the front (as opposed to looking all bunched from the front like a big ol’ runner wedgie going on under the surface).
Then I ironed the outside seams on each end of the runner down to create the finished seams that would be seen from the front. I went straight to ironing because I was feeling gutsy (and didn’t feel like pinning the entire outside edge since the baby was about to wake up from her nap any minute and I was feeling all jumpy and why-the-heck-not about it)…
… and then sewed those two seams (these seams would show, which still kind of scares me but it wasn’t a big deal in the end- I just tried to go slow and steady and keep things nice and straight).
In about five minutes I had a nice tailored looking seam on both ends of my runner (without any pin usage – saweet). Then I had to deal with the unhemmed sides of the whole thing.
So I ironed them down too. I have to admit that not pinning felt good. Like I found some sort of shortcut to the next level in the video game of sewing.
Then I just slowly and carefully stitched around my ironed edges to create a nice neat hem around the outside of the rest of the runner. Aside from my bobbin running out halfway through (which pisses me off every time, I’m not gonna lie), it wasn’t annoying or frustrating. I was almost – dare I say it? – enjoying the process.
Cue the collective gasp.
Anyway, after making out with turning off my sewing machine and removing my freshly completed runner, I just ironed the whole thing again, just to make sure it was nice and tailored looking. Houston, we have a runner:
I hope to use it at lots of Clara parties to come. And probably for a bunch of other parties too- it’s just really happy and festive. It even looks kind of Easter-ish so it could work for a fun little egg dying party or something. Oh and the total cost = zero bucks (thanks to already having the fabric on hand). As for how long it took, I knocked it out in about 45 minutes to an hour. So it’s perfect for any beginners out there who want to kill me because they think I’m getting good at sewing. I’m not. I’m not even junior varsity. I’m the water boy of sewing. I don’t know the right terms for things, I make tons of mistakes as I go, but I’m telling you – just messing around until you end up with something you like is a surprisingly effective approach thus far. So take it as a sign that if a cursed sewing-machines-revolt-in-my-presence person like me can tackle some simple projects, you can do it too. Probably much better than I can.
Psst- Our baby-proofing adventures continue over on BabyCenter today. Can you handle the excitement?
I Think I’m Possessed
What else can possibly explain the fact that I’m laying in bed at 12:52 and thinking these totally-foreign-for-me words: “I’m so excited about my quilt I can hardly sleep.” Seriously. The only explanation is some sort of unbeknownst-to-me lobotomy. I’m the girl who loves to use iron-on hem tape to make curtains and crib skirts (here, here, and here). I’m the girl who whined for about 2,000 words about just how cursed I am when it comes to sewing (here). Can I really be the girl who can’t sleep because of a quilt? Insanity.
But I am. Here’s what I’ve been up to. And it is by no means the right way to do this. I went rogue for sure. I don’t know proper form or correct terms and didn’t even take a class or read a book about quilting. I just took it one this-might-work step at a time and held my breath a lot. So to all of you fancy quilting experts, please don’t snort too loudly with laughter when you see how it all went down for me. I just made it with love. And a bit of wonkyness for good measure. You know, just so it’s obvious that it wasn’t made in a factory. Haha. It’s perfectly imperfect and then some. But I love it so much I can’t sleep. Total shocker. Anyway, on to the crazy feel-my-way-along-as-I-go process. It all started when I came across this gorgeous quilt on Pinterest and was immediately inspired:
I’ve always wanted to use all of the mixed and matched fabrics from Clara’s weekly photo project to create some sort of crazy birthday quilt but I knew it had to be pretty darn simple for me to even have a prayer of pulling off my own wonky version of it. But the un-lined-up corners and white stripes interspersed with different textures and prints had me at hello. This I could do. Maybe. And if not it might not kill me to try, just to learn that it’s not quite within my skill level yet. So I trecked out to JoAnn Fabric and used one of those 50% coupons I always get in the mail to get two yards of white quilt-ish fabric for just $8 (the kind with a quilted cotton front and some thin batting already sewn into it on the back). I figured it would work as the white striped fabric between each strip of textured and printed fabric from Clara’s weekly shots and also as the backing for the entire quilt.
Then I washed all of the weekly fabric along with the new white quilted fabric so it was all nice and soft (and pre-shrunk). Then I had to iron a bunch of it because it was all ganked up from the washing process. Boo. That took a while but you know I did it in front of the TV at night after putting Clara to bed, right? Then I parked my butt on the sectional and cut out three inch by twelve inch strips of each of Clara’s weekly backdrops (except for some which weren’t fabric at all like the yellow rug, the shower curtain, the moving box, and a few other non-fabric items we tossed in there). When it came to the three inch width, I wasn’t exact with that since I liked the not-all-the-same-or-lined-up-look of my inspiration quilt from Pinterest). And I left out some of the crazier fabrics that I knew wouldn’t work that well so I was left with 27 different strips of around 3″ x 12″ fabric (I ditched things like the crunchy gold New Years fabric since I knew it wouldn’t be soft and cuddly like the rest of the blanket). And nobody loves a scratchy blanket. Especially the bean.
Then I cut out 30 three-inch-wide-by-12-inch-long strips of my white fabric. Those 30 strips left me with about two thirds of my yardage of white fabric to use for the backing, which was a pretty happy accident. Then I kept my arse firmly planted on the sofa and just started pinning away (one white strip got pinned to one printed strip, which got pinned to another white strip, and so on – for a striped look).
Nineteen strips made up each row (nine patterned ones alternated between 10 white ones)…
… which I would then sew together (using straight invisible seams from the back of the fabric, which I learned are the easiest kind from making my Sue pillows).
After creating three super long strips that were each about a foot wide and three feet long, I then laid all three of those super long rows next to each other to create this three foot by three foot square that looked pretty reminiscent of my inspiration quilt. I was shocked. It was kind of coming together. This is when I started entertaining the idea that my brain had been switched with a stranger’s.
Note: I originally considered straggering the printed strips like some of the rows on the inspiration quilt (theirs line up sometimes and don’t other times) but I laid it out on the floor the staggered way first and it looked too busy for my liking since my stripes were thicker and most of them had large-scale patterns so it looked kinda cluttered. I then laid them out in the above long stripes (instead of staggering them) and liked the clean and simple look a lot better. So that’s how the front pattern came to be.
This is the point at which I stood and stared at that giant not-perfect-but-pretty-great striped patchwork-ish square of baby blanket happiness for about an hour. I was in total shock that I hadn’t sew-cried or screamed into a pillow yet. Next it was time to iron down all of my seams on the back since I’ve heard that after stitching fabrics together a huge part of making non-bunchy quilts is to iron the back seams so they lay flat (because once those back seams are covered with quilt backing, it’s not exactly easy to iron them flat).
Then after each row was ironed so the back seams laid flat, I pinned one row to another row (with the ugly side out, so once it was stitched the seam would be invisible from the front)…
… and after a quick pass through Oh Brother (my trusty sewing machine) I was left with this:
And may I just say that my sewing machine is so great (it’s a Brother XL2600I that I found on Amazon for $89 with great reviews that I affectionately call Oh Brother). It was all totally user error that was tripping me up in the beginning and I would definitely recommend it. So far at least. It might revolt on me next week. You never know…
Then I repeated that process and added another row (which I again pinned from the back and stitched so the seam was invisible from the front).
That big smile above is what proud looks like. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t a) sewn my finger, b) created a giant nest of string like I did during my first sewing attempt, and c) thrown a maimed quilt on the floor and stormed out of the room. Holy bananas. My plan was actually working. And I wasn’t even cursing.
Here’s the back-view (also note that Burger is kindly showing you a chihuahua back-view):
After I ironed those new back seams that I had just created by joining those three long rows, I took the backing and the front of my quilt and faced the good sides towards each other on top of each other (so it was like a sandwich with the good stuff in the middle). Then I pinned around three of the four edges and I used my sewing machine to stich around them while keeping it all inside out like this. Yup, I basically made a giant pillow sham just like I did here with my Sue pillows. I even stitched a bit of the fourth side closed on each end (leaving just the middle portion open so I could flip things right-side out again.
Then I flipped it right-side-out and hand stitched the unsewn middle of the last edge closed (with my butt parked on the sofa in front of the TV of course):
It was definitely starting to look quilt-like, but it was sort of like a pillowcase that had been stitched closed with nothing in it. If you pulled on the backing with one hand and the quilted front with another hand, you could balloon the whole thing out since nothing was holding them together except for the stitching around the edges. So here’s where I actually started to feel like I was quilting. I also started to sweat profusely because I was about to dive into seams that show on both sides of the quilt. No more hidden seams done from the inside. I actually had to stitch down from the top of each white row of strips to the bottom, and the little white seam would definitely be exposed, so any ganked up thread or knotted nests of string would ruin the whole effect in a hot minute. And I would probably have had a full blown meltdown after all that work if things suddenly went south. So I gritted my teeth, held my breath, crossed my fingers, decided I needed them and uncrossed them, and tried to take it slow and steady.
Lo and behold, I was left with this.
And I was also left wondering who the heck took over my body and made a friggin quilt. Insane. It’s definitely not perfect, but a week ago I would have bet you a million dollars that I couldn’t ever sew two strips of fabric together, much less make a quilt (albeit an imperfect one). And I actually love it in all of its not-quite-perfect glory. Hopefully that will remind Clara that it was one of my first attempts at sewing, which she brought out in me (because before she was born you couldn’t pay me to use a sewing machine- let alone convince me to buy one and attempt a friggin quilt, but for some reason she made me want to make her something meaningful with all of her weekly fabrics). In case I’m not hitting this hard enough, I am shocked that I actually made a quilt. Seriously, almost speechless.
Oh and in the spirit of Burger sharing his hindquarters above, here’s the finished back-view:
Now I get to give it to Beaner for her b-day and I hope that she’ll always have it and know that her entirely undomestic mom (you think I’m kidding, but John does the cooking and the laundry around here) was possessed by some other-worldy being and whipped up a quilt to commemorate her big one year birthday. I’m not gonna lie, there were some victory laps around the house. And yes, John sang the rocky song while I ran around waving my quilt in the air.
In summation: Word to Oh Brother (yes, I just hit you with a word to your mother slash Brother sewing machine joke). Booyah.
Psst- My jazz hands even excitedly created a new category called “Sew Excited” a la Jesse Spano (get that reference here). So you can see the whopping three posts in there by clicking the Topics tab up near our search bar and scrolling down to find it.
Psssssst- We went Nursery Crashing over on BabyCenter this morning. Get in on the fun here.
