How to make your own French-Belgian linen drapes

Well, the curtains are done.

Before

If you'd like to make your own version of CB2's French-Belgian linen panels you just have to follow a few easy steps.

First, fall in love with an expensive fabric. The hallmark of a good sewing project is thinking you're going to save money by making it yourself, then spending a TON of money and wondering if you should have hired child laborers instead (kids with ADD can sew a straighter seam than me). I chose a Tencel "linen-look" fabric that drapes beautifully and can be dyed.

Next, cut off eight foot lengths from your bolt of fabric. Don't vacuum or swiffer the floors first. You want the fabric to catch as much dust and hair as possible. Ideally you should be muttering, "Oh my god, what is wrong with me?" every couple of minutes.

Starch and iron all your edges. The rolled hem foot on the sewing machine is a bitch to use and if all the stars are not aligned correctly everything will go to hell and you'll be ripping out stitches for hours. A crisp fabric really helps in this case. Practice using your rolled hem foot until you feel confident using it. I bought a smaller piece of my fabric and sewed the edge, cut it off, then sewed it again and again and again, for what seemed like forever.

Start sewing on your real fabric. So far so good.

Oh my god, what is wrong with me? Son of a . . . bitch . . . shit. I hate the rolled hem foot.

Rip out the seams and redo it when this happens. Start to wonder if it wouldn't be faster to use a regular foot, even with all the pressing you'd need to do. Run your finished panels through the washing machine before hemming the bottom, just in case they shrink (pros do this before they ever start sewing but I have issues). Notice that a lot of your seams now look like hell when they seemed just fine pre-washing.

What is wrong with with my rolled hem foot? Blerg.

Spend an exorbitant amount of time at JC Penney (sorry, JCP) trying to special order the stupid corner bracket for your curtain rods. They have a new system and the clerk is 1000 years old (but nice! so nice!). Pull up the part on your phone and show her, as you realize that you could've just ordered online, in your pajamas no less, and saved everyone the headache.

Wait for freaking EVER for your hardware to arrive. Learn that JC Penney screwed up charging your gift card twice, so your order never shipped. Also, they processed the order under the name "Haether."

Hem your panels. You'd think by this point you could reasonably sew with your rolled hem foot but YOU ARE WRONG. Decide that the lack of overhead light in the living room is probably a good thing.

Hang up your panels with simple clip rings and realize that you can't really see the shitty hems, so maybe everything's gonna be okay. And you know what? They do vaguely resemble the inspiration panels.

Congrats! When they are closed they look like you spent a lot of time and money to hang white bedsheets.

Also, you screwed up the length.

So. Greg thinks they need some color and I'm worried about the sun bleaching any color we put in them, which is why I wanted white curtains in the first place. We're going to live with them for a while and I'm going to get more Ikea Enje blinds so I can get rid of the current situation:

This attractive option was installed by the house stager from my reveal. She was *so* worried I'd peek at the room that she posted signs everywhere and glued (OH, SO MUCH GLUE) those awful looking blind inserts into the window casing.

And then she emailed me, admonishing over and over not to peek. My friend told me I should peek, just to spite her, but I am a rule follower. I didn't peek. And I didn't remove those god-awful blinds until now.

I have a couple of options now. The first, to dye the curtains navy. We have a lot of blue in the room currently.

Second: dip dye the bottoms dark blue. The blue wouldn't bleach out because it would fall below the window. This is on-trend right now but it will eventually go out of style. Of course, if that happens I can just dye them navy at that point.

It might look something like this.

Or this.

So I guess the last step in making these panels is crippling self-doubt. Tada! Any opinions are greatly appreciated.

The saddest marigolds in all the land

Some of the plants are having a harder time with the rain than others.

No Day of the Dead garlands for me.

Garden bloggers' bloom day October 2012

The rains are finally here! Not everyone is happy about it but I'm selfish and sick of watering the garden. I'm also eager to finally get the ground softened so I can plant these guys:

I snapped most of these last week, right before the rain kicked in.

Salvia 'Black and Blue'

Mexican milkweed Asclepias curassavica

Greg's father gave us what he dubbed "screaming orange" crocosmia in July. They got in the ground late so they bloomed late . . . I wish I could do that every year. They are so hard to photograph but they are the most fantastic yellow-orange-red combo.

NOID Crocosmia

The yellow Coreopsis 'Moonbeam' and orange Zauschneria californica 'Wayne's Select' are still blooming like crazy.

Okay, this isn't a bloom so much as a fruit, but my creeping snowberry (Symphoricarpos mollis) is gorgeous right now.

Symphoricarpos mollis

Agastache 'Ava'

NOID canna

Happy bloom day, y'all! Head over to Carol's to see the rest of the show.

Damn it.

This is why we can't have nice things.

A cat or a raccoon or someone who really hates birds broke the $5 birdbath that I drove all the way to Cornelius in rush hour traffic to get. This is the third one I've lost. I don't know how I can find them any cheaper than that.

I give up.

It's still growing.

Last week was windy. All that wind really fluffed up my castor bean plant, causing it to lose some height but gain some width. 

No joke, it's as wide as my Honda is long.

But I'm more excited because my Mahonia media 'Arthur Menzies' put on about 8 inches of growth overnight.

Grow, baby, grow! That castor bean is going to die soon and I'll have a big gaping hole that you need to fill.

I have expensive taste

I feel like my house reflects me as a person, in that I clean up okay but I'm always lacking a bit of polish. I'll get all dressed up for work and notice that my shoes need to be polished or that I have threads hanging off of my crappy old purse. My house is lacking in finishing details like window treatments and area rugs. 

You know why? Those things are freaking expensive. It doesn't help that I always fall in love with the expensive ones. But it makes me feel like I'm pretending as an adult to have bare floors. I may be 35 and own a house but nobody's buying it because we don't have a rug in the bedroom.

Though someone did call me "ma'am" the other day and I died a little inside.

Every year, like clockwork, my focus turns from gardening to the interior of the house. Right now I'm obsessed with rug hunting. We have two area rugs in the house, one in the living room:

And the shitty indoor/outdoor rug from my reveal, which now lives in the basement:

I found the perfect rug for our bedroom, for the low, low price of $1685 at Schoolhouse Electric. It's soft, it's not made of polypropylene, and it's not a trendy style that I'll hate in two years. It's so pretty. 

Image: Walton handwoven llama rug from Schoolhouse Electric

Come ON, that thing is sexy! And it would look great in our bedroom! (And maybe I'd throw one of those army blankets across the end of the bed. And now that I'm staring at this picture I want to swap out those nightstands. And the lamps. Hmm.) Someone help me convince Greg that we should buy this, should it ever go on sale.

Or maybe I'll keep the heat off in the morning this winter and he'll convince himself.

Curtain prototype is done

Last year I found the perfect mid-century pinch-pleat draperies at JC Penney. Pam at Retro Renovation said her readers found them to be a good source. At Christmas my parents gave me a gift certificate to JC Penney for so I could buy some . . . and JCP immediately stopped producing the style/color/length I needed.

Image from Retro Renovation

So I've been buying (and returning) curtains left and right, trying to find something I liked. Then I saw this post on Emily Henderson's site about where to find cheap but good curtains. I liked these "French-Belgian linen panels," but at $60 a pop I'd need to spend $600 just in the living room.

I am so sorry for these terrible photos. Do you know how hard it is to photograph a window with natural light streaming through? I picked up some "linen-look" tencel fabric, which is dyable, and used a rolled hem foot to zip a 3mm hem around all four sides. The real deal will be a floor-length panel with a more substantial curtain rod.

I have an Ikea Enje blind behind it, which is wonderful during the day but it provides zero privacy at night. I wonder if all the people who have installed Enjes in their house realize this? Wait for the sun to go down, turn on your lights, then step outside and see your life on display.

So now I start the laborious process of doing the prep work for a bunch of panels. The fabric is so thin and malleable that it has to be starched and ironed (and any stray threads trimmed) before running it through the rolled hem foot on my sewing machine. My hope is to get one panel prepped after work each night, then sew like crazy this weekend and get them hung. I figure that gives JC Penney enough time to magically start producing the pinch-pleat draperies I wanted in the first place.