Tuesday 28 July 2015

My first attempt at curtains

Hello again! It's been a while! So much for my good intentions for keeping this blog up to date, but to be honest, there's not been a huge amount to report on.

We've been busy doing up my office room which will not only house me and my laptop on my working from home days, but will also become a dedicated place for my sewing machine to sit. At the moment I end up dragging the machine and all of its associated gubbins downstairs once the small ones are in bed in order to get a bit of a project done. This inevitably ends up with me managing to do about 90 minutes sewing on a good night, before other jobs call me away, or Mister Knitty declares it to be Breaking Bad on Netflix time. The latter is no bad thing, because i. Breaking Bad is our new obsession (yes we are very late to the game) and ii. I get to continue with my knitting WIP, the beautiful Northmavine hoodie by Kate Davies. I'm loving the colours in this pattern and also working with the beautiful Shetland yarn again.

But whilst my lair of sewing joy is still in progress, I've been trying to finish a couple of projects at either end of the sewing spectrum in terms of size and scale. First up: curtains for the lounge.


Sewing on a grand scale

I'm sure there are a billion tutorials on curtain making - actually, I know there are a billion tutorials, as I waded through heaps of them. So I am not going to even attempt to add to that. Instead, a few things that I learnt during making mine:

1. Choosing a busy print is a great idea if you can't be bothered matching: I did take a look at whether I could match up the pattern on the fabric we chose (Ester from Scion), but there is so much going on that it makes no real difference. A lot of curtain fabrics are so expensive, the last thing you want to be doing is scrapping a whole lot just to get a match when you don't need it
Busy pattern for a lazy sewist
2. Straight lines with such huge seams is not fun. I am not particularly good at staying straight even with small projects, so I knew this would end up a little wonky. Marking with chalk along the pattern line did help a lot

3. Let the curtains hang a little before hemming. This helps to resolve any wonkiness achieved in point 2. Once they've settled, it's quite easy to pin up a fairly neat hem to make sure it matches up

This project also helped me to practice some hand hemming, which I loved doing. Normally I loathe hemming and it always looks appalling, but I am really pleased with the finish of these.

Handhemming FTW