Nursery Curtains - Finally!

You'd think the curtains for the nursery were really something special, based on how long I've been trying to complete them. In fact, they are almost as simple as curtains can be. And I still had to have help to finish them. Here are the nitty-gritty sewing details. Can you believe I finally have a sewing project to post about? It's been ages! (Feel free to skip to the baby pictures at the end if you don't give a rat's ass about my sewing projects!)

I decided to go with a plain cotton in a slightly softer shade than the butterfly on the quilt. I had planned to do my usual style of curtains, using curtain rings with clips to hold up a rectangle of fabric. Matt wanted grommets, so I decided to try them. Unfortunately the only grommets I could find were metallic, which is not what I wanted for the room. I wanted white, to match the curtain rods, crib, and other accents in the room. I finally found white grommets at JoAnn Fabrics, but they are plastic. I think they turned out OK.

The fabric is cheap cotton broadcloth from JoAnn's, on sale for $1.50/yd. The grommets were ten bucks per package of eight before I used up some of those coupons JoAnn sends me every week. My MIL Shirley helped me work out the spacing for the grommets. At the time I only had three packages of grommets for my four panels, and it wasn't quite enough. Luckily I was able to pick up one more package so I could use eight grommets per 45 inch wide curtain panel.

Grommet package, reinforcing, test piece

I used a three inch wide strip of something stiff (from the curtain section at Hancock's, $.99/yd) to reinforce the top of each panel, as suggested on the back of the grommet package. It is not iron-on; it's sewn in as part of the folding over the raw edge at the top. The grommet package included a template to trace the circle to be cut out. I found the template to be too small. The grommets didn't quite cover up the cut edges of the small holes, so I cut the holes a little bigger than the template. The two halves of the plastic grommets just snap together, no hammer required.

I got the grommets done on the first panel, and the top edges reinforced and finished on the rest of the panels. My mom finished the project for me while I was at the hospital with Henry. She also managed to conquer my heaps of laundry and tidy up my house. Thanks, Mom!

If I had to do it over again, I would choose fabric that's a little bit heavier so it wouldn't wrinkle so much. Other than that, the curtains are perfect! Thanks again to Mom and Shirley for helping!

In other news, Henry had his first real bath yesterday!