Curtains Part I

We have really tall ceilings in our new living room as you have seen. The longest curtains that have a wide variety are 84" which is what we had in our old living room. Our white curtains were the perfect size for our old room

Old Living Room

But when we hung them up in the new house, they left something to be desired; 12" to be precise. While this may not seem like a big deal to everybody, it was going to drive me crazy. While you can find 96" or 8 ft long curtains, they are few and far between. This made me decide to make the curtains for the living room. I spent awhile looking online for fabrics, and I found quite a few that I liked, but all the ones I liked were at least $7/yard. Now, this wouldn't be horrible except for the fact that I needed 6 curtains all 8 ft long. Translation: ~16 yards of fabric. I'll let you do the math but 7x16= too much money for new curtains. I was bummed by this until I remembered something. Marden's, which is a surplus and salvage store in Maine, has a fabric department. While I was up in Maine, I stopped by to check out what they had. Not only did they have a ton of fabric, the prices did not exceed $5/yard!

One row of 8+ rows of fabric

After almost an hour of browsing so many different fabrics my head started to hurt, I narrowed my choices down to two fabrics, one safe choice, and one risky choice. I brought them both up to the fabric clerks, and after doing the math out for them (they could not believe the I needed 16 yards of fabric before that) they informed me that the safe choice only had about 14 yards left. After hemming and hawing over my risky choice (I had a pic of the living room on my phone) I finally decided to go for it. Since I still haven't been home to see how it looks in person, I still don't know if I made the correct choice, but I really like the fabric so I'm going to make it work!

After I got my curtain fabric cut, I remembered I still hadn't found a curtain I liked for the kitchen window. So back out to the fabric floor I went. Since I had looked at basically every fabric twice at this point, I found the fabric for the kitchen a lot faster.

This I only needed a yard of and combined with my curtain fabric, the total cost was less than half what I would have paid for any fabric I found online! Stay tuned for how I turn this fabric into curtains and how they look in place!