More instant-gratification curtains!

As the pieces of the living room started to accumulate, I became obsessed with finding the perfect curtains for the window/door next to the couch. It's a very drafty west-facing door/sidelight combination like this one:

In winter and summer I can practically feel the window's impact on my utility bill. As soon as we moved in I put some sheers on tiny rods at the top and bottom of each panel for privacy and a little relief from the afternoon sun. The winter wind whistling through the cracks around the windows called for something sturdy and layered. "Sturdy" and "layered" are two words I would never use to describe my usual approach to sewing curtains.


I brought home all kinds of curtains from the stores, but nothing was quite right. I even sought professional help from Jennaver at Eye on Design. She was very patient and helpful. We found a fabric I liked, and she wrote up a quote for the curtains, including giant grommets and a nickel-finish curtain rod. And then Matt and I had sticker shock. I was almost willing to pay a three digit price for the curtains because I was so frustrated by my curtain-shopping failure, but Matt refused to buy curtains that cost as much as a car payment. Sorry, Jennaver!


I went back to the drawing board and decided on solid white curtains made from a duvet cover. It's cheap and has great insulation value, and it only requires a tiny bit of sewing. I found a king-size duvet cover at Marshall's with a pattern of stitching in concentric squares. I eyeballed the middle (no measuring!) and cut it in half. All I had to do was turn under the cut edges, clip on my favorite curtain rings, and hem the bottom. And by "hem the bottom" I mean fold it under and pin it while it's hanging on the rod, and then use the sewing machine to run an almost straight line of stitching in the general vicinity of the bottom. The layers of fabric and the lazy sewing technique made the hem a bit lumpy. The good news is that it blends right in with the lumpy texture of the quilting so it doesn't bother me.

The curtain rod is from Lowe's. I like the vaguely atomic finials, especially next to the Wal-mart ripoff of the George Nelson Ball Clock. The lucky bamboo plant must really be lucky, because it has survived for at least four years. When I finally repotted it I couldn't resist finding a pot to give that corner of the room a zing of orange. I do love a zing of orange. Don't you?

Chair #3, Danish Modern plywood

Of all my odd chairs, this is absolutely my favorite. It's another junk shop - excuse me, I mean "antique mall" - find. When I found it, it was upholstered in a brown tweedy fabric with flecks of orange. An infusion of cat pee was included for no additional charge. Even with the nasty upholstery and the rusty metal feet, I knew it was totally worth the $50 price. The honey-colored finish on the plywood is in great shape, and gives the room a lovely zing of orange that complements my blue walls. It's marked "Made in Denmark" on the back, but no other marks are present. The chair may be a famous Danish designer piece, or it may be a mass produced piece of junk. I don't know or care. I like it!

A little metal polish and a quick reupholstery job (in a suede-ish fabric called Hula Opal) made this chair the star of the living room. This is the most comfortable chair in the room - even more comfy than the other plywood chair. The bent plywood back curves around to form armrests that are just right for resting my elbows on - especially if I'm playing video games on the PlayStation2.

Update 1/23/2008: It IS a Danish designer piece! (And now I sit in it to play video games on the PS3 instead of the PS2.)

Chair #2, Bent Plywood from SIU-C

The chronically cool Design*Sponge declared that bent plywood was, like, so over in 2004. I don't care. I'm fully aware that I'm way behind the cutting edge.

I can't take the credit for this project. Matt did all the work. Mom bought the chair for me. (Thanks Mom!) All I did was find it, want it and drag it home.

The chair is very sturdy and surprisingly comfortable. It's no Eames LCW, but it's a good chair. I found it at the now-defunct Retro Kitty on the eastern edge of Carbondale. The finish was in terrible shape. It looked like it had been out in the rain since 1946, but it was sturdy, comfortable, and only $20. On closer inspection I found an old inventory control tag from Southern Illinois University. That begs the question: Was it sold legally as surplus inventory, or have I purchased stolen goods? Is this chair marine salvage? I lived in the retro-tastic dorms at SIU-C for a few semesters, and I'm pretty sure that lots of furniture is at the bottom of Campus Lake.

Matt really latched on to this project. He sanded the chair, bought new hardware, and refinished it in a dark mahogany stain. It's beautiful and comfortable. I certainly can't say that about all the odd chairs in my collection, especially the red one.

Curtains (the easy way) and Charley Harper

I can use a sewing machine, but I'm only comfortable with straight stitching. That's why I love making curtains. I'm not a fluffy, poufy, ruffled curtains kind of girl, so my lack of sewing skills is not a problem. I only need to know how to make simple rectangles. I use curtain rings with clips so I don't have to do anything tedious, like add loops or pleats.

Measuring or cutting fabric is just too much pressure for me to deal with, so I base the amount of fullness for the curtains on the width of the fabric I'm working with. Really, is anyone ever going to look at my curtains and be aghast that the fullness is a convenient 2.1 times the window width instead being a perfect 2.5 times the window width? I think not. I usually don't even bother to turn the selvage (the uncut edge on the long sides) under. I cut the length of fabric longer than I need it to be, turn under the top and bottom, and clip on the rings. It's as close to home-decor instant gratification as you can get without using paint.

Check out the curtains in my bedroom, made from a nice cotton print from JoAnn Fabrics. In a fit of overachievement, I matched the pattern repeats on the panels. (See the reddish leaves line up horizontally?) It was a stretch for an otherwise lazy seamstress, but I still managed to do it without measuring or calculating anything. I cut the first panel off the length of fabric and spread it out on the floor. Then I laid the rest of the fabric parallel to the cut panel and moved it up and down until the red leaves lined up so I could cut the second panel to match the first. No measuring required!

The hardware is Wal-Mart's finest. The fantastic framed print is a signed and numbered Charley Harper called His Eyes are on the Sparrows. I spend my snooze button minutes every day wondering if it's going to be a sparrow day or a cat day.

I made enough curtain panels to cover all the windows in the room and I still have almost three yards of fabric left. My fabric stash is mostly a product of erring on the safe side at the fabric store. I'm considering using the rest of this fabric for a simple dress, if I can get over my fear of sewing anything more complicated than curtains...and my fear of wearing brightly colored patterns on my giant ass.

More thoughts about Charley Harper

Custom shower curtain rod, the hard way

Why must I always do things the hard way? I have an idea and I make it happen, and then, after I'm finished and almost satisfied with the results, I realize a much easier way to do it. The shower curtain rod in the bathroom is a good example.

When we bought the house, the one and only bathroom was painted a nice shade of green. The shade of green was very subdued and tasteful, but the room is so small and so brightly lit that the green walls bounced greenish light on to everything - including pasty skin. Ewww. It had to go.

According to my Yoda-like graphics teacher, blue is the most universally flattering background color for skin tones because blue and orange are complementary colors. I prefer to be surrounded by blue when my pale flab must be exposed. (I have blue beach towels and four sets of blue sheets.) Blue was my first thought for repainting the bathroom. However, with the living/dining room being the color of a swimming pool I decided another color was necessary. Matt and I settled on a medium gray color and a minimalist scheme of shades of gray and white with metallic accents. I made a simple shower curtain from some partially translucent, white-on-white, floral fabric from JoAnn Fabrics.

I found a cable curtain rod system at Target that could be mounted on the ceiling (Thanks, Matt!). I separated the pieces of a set of drapery clips so that I could add chain extensions between the ring and the clip, and threaded the ring piece onto the cable. I always use drapery clips because it allows for instant curtain gratification. Any rectangle of fabric can be a curtain in minutes - no grommets, no loops, no buttonholes, no rod pockets!

The chain I used for the extenders is called lamp chain, according to the very helpful guy at my Ace Hardware who cut a piece off the big spool for me. I have no idea what the little connectors are called. I used wire cutters to cut the chain to equal-length pieces. I used the connectors to make a loop at the top and the bottom. It works pretty well, and it looks almost exactly how I wanted it to look. Success!

Later I realized that I had seen this arrangement of ceiling-mounted hardware with chain-extended rings somewhere before. It all clicked while I was visiting my aunt in the hospital. This arrangement is common in hospitals for the privacy curtains that separate the beds. The parts are available lots of places on the web. (Search for "curtain track" or go here). I think my way might have been cheaper, but I'm all in favor of Internet-enabled instant gratification!

In the beginning, there was beige

Why do people seem so intent on surrounding themselves with neutrals? Is it because they truly enjoy nondescript colors? Does beige make people happy? Is it some attempt at being elegant and understated? Are people afraid to commit to a color? It's a sickness and it must be stopped. IKEA is doing their part, and so am I.

I have lived most of my life in a beige world, but it wasn't always this way. For proof, check out the plumbing fixtures in homes built from 1950 to 1980. The house next door to mine only has one bathroom, and it is vintage Barbie pink - tub, sink, toilet, and tile - with sparkles! The house I grew up in had blue fixtures in one bathroom and yellow fixtures in two others. At some point in my childhood the trippy 1970's orange/avocado/harvest gold psychedelic farm scene wallpaper in the kitchen was replaced by subdued shades of beige and navy blue. The golden brown shag carpet in the living room gave way to beige carpet. I'm not saying I would go back to the color palette of the 1970's, but at least there was color in the palettes of previous decades. Is there any color that is associated with recent decades as strongly as avocado and orange evoke the 1970's?

Flashback: Dad and M.A. in the kitchen at my parents' house. The wallpaper went up in the mid 1970's when the house was new. The photo is from the late 1980's.

How does a household go from trippy orange wallpaper to the visual equivalent of khaki pants? More importantly, how does it return to the world of happy colors?

In our house in Belleville I found the previous paint colors - minty/pea soup green - on the walls and trim in almost every room. The entire living/dining area of our house had a fresh coat of rehabber-beige paint when we moved in. To be specific, the color of beige was exactly the color of the light switch plates and outlets. I suppose the neutral scheme was an effort to make the room look bigger, but at what cost?

Matt and I brought home nearly every paint swatch we could find and weeded through them. Then I went to this color visualizer to see how the chosen color might look in a room similar to ours. Our couch is strange grayish-brown that looks purple in natural light. The color visualizer let me "paint" the couch in the virtual room of my choice as well as the walls. This is the image I brought home for Matt's approval:

He said to go ahead. I had a moment of doubt, but I decided to go for it anyway. I did a quick calculation to figure out how much paint I would need. Two coats later, the beige was gone and the living/dining room was very, very blue. I used a slightly lighter shade of blue on the groovy wood paneling above the fireplace.

The bowling alley floor plan (one long living/dining room) makes the blue a little bit overwhelming. My plan is to differentiate the two ends of the room by using the lighter shade of blue to paint vertical stripes on the dining room walls.

Chair #1, after Rietveld's Steltman Chair

The St. Louis Art Museum has a great Decorative Arts and Design collection, which includes a couple of chairs by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld. The Red Blue Chair is probably his best-known piece. I know, it looks like the least comfortable Adirondack chair imaginable. It's not Rietveld's least comfortable chair though - I think that honor goes to the Steltman Chair.

The Steltman Chair is one of those pieces of modern art that makes people say "That's not art! Anybody with a saw and a couple of 2x4s could build that!" And so I was inspired to do exactly that. The only problem is that I don't use power tools, and I'm not so good with woodworking. Luckily my brother and my husband both fell for the apparent simplicity of the design and agreed to make one for me. I gave them a crude sketch from one of my trips to the museum and a very crude balsa wood model. They pieced it together in no time. It wobbles just a tiny bit, but I take full responsibility for that, due to the pitiful sketch and model they had to work from. The model isn't much to look at, but making it made me appreciate the simplicity of Rietveld's design more.

Who cares if the chair wobbles anyway? No one is actually going to sit in it. It's obvious that this is not a chair for sitting in; this is a chair for viewing like sculpture. My house is not big enough to accommodate non-functional sculpture, so the chair has to be a garden sculpture. I had a vision of looking out the window across the back yard to a collection of fantastically bold forms against the green backdrop of weedy shrubs. So I went to buy paint. RED paint! All that greenery in the back yard desperately needs a zing of red.

(It's not as orange as it looks in the photo. )

Check out my other chairs here

Intro and Manifesto

It seems that every organization I've been involved with - either personally or professionally - has agonized over their first steps with a public identity. I'm finding out that it's the same for my first tentative steps into blogging. Each group has their own name for that opening statement: vision, mission, guiding principals, goals, etc.. I have suffered through hours of discussion over whether a vision and mission are "who we are and what we do" or "where we are going and how we get there". I've had to bite my tongue more than once to keep myself from yelling "Who cares!" Still, it's a useful exercise for a new venture. So, I will start with a statement of purpose, like most organizations do. Except I will skip the tedious discussion and consensus-building phase...because I'm not schizophrenic.

I make things because I enjoy the process
This blog is about documenting the things I have made or modified. Usually it involves fabric, paint, furniture or clothing. My life is delightfully stable (boring, really) and doesn't involve much personal drama, so I invent drama for myself by becoming manically obsessed with projects. I make things or redo inexpensive items to use in my home. Sometimes I recruit friends and family to help me. I use fabric and paint in happy colors because they make me happy. I'm usually not happy with the results because I have a teeny little perfectionist streak, but that usually gives me a good reason to redo the project. I intend to use this blog to keep track of my successes and failures, and to show my long-distance friends and family what I've been doing.

I'm eternally off-trend
I've pretty much stopped caring whether or not anyone else likes what I do. My husband doesn't seem to mind my project obsessions as long as I don't insist that he help me. I'm not a trendsetter or a trend follower. I enjoy style and design, but I don't follow fashion. I like things that are simple and streamlined. On a good day, it's an uncluttered and timeless aesthetic. On a bad day, it's just plain boring.

Critics (and everyone else) are welcome
I'm very critical of my own efforts. I revel in the minor flaws and complete failures. I intend to show them here, so that I have a record of improvement (I hope!) over time. I'm open to suggestions and critiques, and I have a pretty thick skin because frankly, I don't give a damn. Friends, family, and any random strangers that find their way here are welcome to share their thoughts about what I do and how I do it.

I promise to post at least once a week
I have a bunch of projects completed since my husband and I moved into our first home in November 2005. I will post them once a week while I finish up current projects. Feel free to hassle me via e-mail if I don't.