"Windows are the eyes of a room, drapes are the eyelashes"

Drapes, Curtains, what's the difference?  Beats me.  I just know that I like them and needed them on my windows.  Like everything else I've purchased or made in my new place, the search was long and I confess probably obsessive.  Ands it funny, sometimes I have a vision of what I think I want and it turns out to be totally different and other times, I know exactly what I want and if I can't find it (or afford it), I have to make it happen. 

I have three windows in my apartment.  Two large picture windows and one regular sized window.   Because of the saturated colors I have in my place (blue in the living room, red in the bedroom, white in the dining room), most of the furniture is white or light so as to not compete with the color.  More on that later, but after trying a few options, I decided to go with light/white curtains. And I decided to use the same pattern for all the windows in the main living space because they were all on the same wall, despite the different wall color.

So one day, I happened to be in Bed, Bath and Beyond passing the shower curtain section and my eye was caught by a shimmering curtain hanging up.  Hmm, I thought, this is cool.

I really liked the hourglass pattern.  I really liked the silver sequins that made up the hourglass pattern and I liked the shinier background which reminded me of the sheen of raw silk.  Luxury! I love diamonds and sparkle. I'm not afraid to decorate with them! So, I grabbed a few packages and brought them home, opened one and spent days looking at it against the blue painted wall of the living room and the swatch of wallpaper to eventually go up in the dining room.   Just in case, I brought home a few other options and swatches of fabric to compare and in the end this one won the battle. It is called Infinity Shower Curtain. 

All was going well, I finally made a decision.  The only problem was that the dimensions of a shower curtain (72 x 72) are very different than the dimensions of a window curtain (usually longer and not as wide).  I bunched up the 72 inches wide shower curtain to see if it was too much fabric, but it worked.  So yay, I didn't have to make changes to the width.  My ceiling height is 8 feet or 96 inches and I wanted some pooling of fabric on the floor.  This meant that I had to add length to the pre-made shower curtain.   But how to connect the pieces so it looked good?  A ribbon to hide the edges of both pieces and to connect them, but what kind of ribbon?  Another thing to obsess about.  I tried a few options and didn't like anything.  I ended up making a custom sash with a strip of the shower curtain and metallic silver ribbon sewed on both edges.  Now just keep in mind, I said I was creative, I didn't say I was a master sewer.  Unless you look really close, you don't notice anything that might possibly not be perfect!

I picked up some really cool clear faceted crystal curtain hardware from JCPenny to hang the curtains on.  The trick to making a window and ceiling look taller/higher, is to hang curtains as high as possible.  I plan on getting crown molding, so I left a little room when I installed the curtain rods.  Then I sewed away and here is what the curtains look like now.  Oh, one more note.  I didn't like all of the silver metal of the curtain rods (very long curtain rod, not easy to install alone) and decided to try covering the rods with extra fabric.  I think it came out cool.  What do you think?

Please ignore the shade on the window, that was there from previous owner and will be replaced eventually! Oh, can't wait.  Here's the dining room.

And one more picture - with the sunlight streaming through!

Kitty makes a cameo. You can see some of my pretty flower on the terrace.

Okay, one more thing.  For the bedroom, which to remind you is RED, I wanted a geometric bold pattern with bright white as the background and red as the pattern color.  I was inspired by some fabrics I saw online but the colors were all wrong.  So I found a website, www.spoonflower.com where you can create your own patterns and get them printed on different types of fabric.  So, that is exactly what I did.  I made my own pattern using mostly Photoshop and then uploaded it to spoonflower and now I (and everyone) can order the fabric (when I get a job) and make curtains for the picture window in my bedroom.  Here is what the pattern looks like that I call Red Trellis.  Don't even get me started on picking the right RGB pantone color so it would print the right color.  Actually, I should say a few words about this.  What you see on the computer screen, is not necessarily what others see on their computer screens and not necessarily what will print out from the computer.  So, in order to ensure the color you want comes out right, you must make sure you use the right settings.  Really simply, because its more complicated, there are codes for different colors.  On spoonflower, there is an option to print on a yard of fabric, color charts.  You can see a tiny bit of it on the very right of the picture of the finished curtains in the dining room. This is a yard of thumb size color swatches very close together.  Put it this way, it took me a while in different lighting to figure out which red to use.  Luckily, it came out well when printed.  One last note, a red that was medium in color, turned out to be coral when printed on fabric so I had to have real red, the color I picked looks much darker on screen.

Okay, that's it for now. Time to go to sleep. 

Thanks for stopping by and stay tuned for more creativity!