High Fiber Content: It's Curtains

Thursday, May 16, 2024

It's Curtains

This picture of my hand-dyed scraps is lit by the strong afternoon/early evening sun at 5:30 pm. This is nice to have the light when it's not super hot, but it's a lot of direct sun. It honestly feels like too much direct sun in a room filled with fabric and thread.

Last summer we had to go as far as to mount on the outside of the house a shade curtain. It worked very well, but it was quite ugly from both outside and inside. So there's a curtain project afoot to see if I can avoid having that shade put up again this year.

The window in my workroom is an unusual size, it's quite wide at 8' and it's 4' high. So that means that buying grab and go curtains from Target isn't in the ballpark really. Unless one has a sewing machine....mwahaha.

All I can hear in my mind's eye memory is the Bugs Bunny version of "It's Curtains for You":

So I bought some "light-filtering" curtains from Target that need to be modified down to size as they are much too long at 84"

These curtains are very simply made, and I discovered that both the top and the bottom have a similar big hem that's open on the ends so that they're can both be functioning rod pockets.

Here's the before picture. The current curtains on the sides are very old and made out of a fairly heavy damask that is also lined. They were made for a normal 6' width window. So they block too much light and also don't cover the whole window. The dumb thingy on the curtain rod in the middle was what I made out of the leftovers from shortening DS's blackout curtains that we got for the same afternoon sun situation. It was made to try and block the bright light that was coming through the top of the exterior shade we put up last year. Unfortunately it didn't work and also looks truly demented.

Tah-dah, much much better. No more demented pouf crouching up on the curtain rod and a very nice filtering of the light as per the package. The two curtains were both shortened to 4' high and then I used the left over fabric to make a third curtain (seen on the left) for when it's really bright.