I’ve always been a “do it your self person”, partly out of necessity and partly for self satisfaction. I’ve been sewing clothing since I was 12 a skill that served me well since I had 4 children to dress for school. I sewed the boys t-shirts, the girls dresses and party dresses, one wedding gown and one sport coat. I don’t say this to brag just to demonstrated I really do have some skill. So you would think making curtains for this apartments three windows in the living room area would be a fairly simple task. Well it wasn’t.
It may have been partly the very light weight sheer fabric I chose, or the inexpensive singer sewing machine I picked up here, or may be it wasn’t the best thread for the fabric and it may have been just me! Anyway to make a long story short I was just making panels that were 60 inches wide with a heading at the top and a hem at the bottom and there were to be 4 panels in each of the curtains for the 2 short windows and 8 panels for the slider door as the fabric was shear I wanted volume so you couldn’t see right through from the outside, but wouldn’t feel closed in inside.
Well the seams puckered and as the fabric frayed it had to be double seamed which seemed to make it worse and the full length of the slider made it difficult to manage sewing on that much slippery fabric and as I kept adding panels, even though the fabric itself was lightweight, the bulk of it became heavy and pulled as I sewed. But I finally got the curtains constructed and it was time to hang them.
I had bought new curtain rods and needed to take down the old ones which had probable been used over the last century and the walls have had many coats of paint which made it difficult to get them down. I finally had to get help from my upstairs neighbor to get the screw out on the two small windows. Then I was able to put up the new ones. When it got time to do the slider door, thankfully I had a friend who was willing come over and remove the old rod and hang the new rod since it was going in a slightly different place. So the rod is up, curtains are all done except for sewing the rings on that I had brought from home. What a mistake that was, first of all my math skills are legendary and I was short 15 rings. Then I had planned to sew them on with the sewing machine. Well I couldn’t do it with this machine, mine at home would have, but not this one so it was all done by hand. Then as I couldn’t match the missing rings I ended up using plastic electric tie loops for the missing rings and the damn things are hung. But I like them, they do exactly what I wanted, the side short ones give just 
enough privacy with out blocking light the slider door ones pull clear off the door for the day time, and a quick pull at night and they give just enough privacy at night that we are not visible from the street. I happy, the project is done, I will never, ever, ever make curtains again and probably only use this machine for mending,
I only have one more DYI project and that is recovering the couch. I’ll let you know how that goes. Signing off KO
Zihuathyme 