Curtain up

One of my (many) crafting projects this year will be new curtains for our bedroom and living room.  We've chosen the fabric for both rooms, but are just waiting to get new windows organised before we put up the curtain poles and then make the curtains.  It is a long drawn-out process, but I'm sure it will be lovely when it's done.

However, last year finished with my first 'make' for the house (we've been living here for almost 2 years now) - kitchen blinds. It was a fairly simple decision to make choosing what sort of window covering I wanted in the kitchen - plain, simple Roman blinds.  Then I'd got it in my head that I wanted stripes.  Friends of ours have some lovely stripey Roman blinds in their kitchen - totally the wrong colour for ours, but I'd got their fabric in my head and started looking for something similar in red and green (the accent colours we'd chosen for the otherwise plain, cream kitchen).

Who would have thought that finding stipes in red and green would have been sooooo difficult.  Red and blue - easy.  Pink and green - plenty.  But Green and Red - forget it!  We'd already started getting 'accent pieces' in a nice bright, pillar-box red and had some green bits too (not all the same type of green really, but it all seemed to work reasonably together), so that sort of tied us.

Thankfully, after trawling online fabric shops and fabric manufacturers, we finally found something suitable in good old John Lewis.  Not quite the pillar-box red I'd imagined, but lovely all the same.

After ordering the fabric and buying all the odds and ends to make the blinds work, it took me about 3-4 weekends to make them.  It was my first attempt at Roman blinds, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'll be making any more in a hurry (and I hadn't realised how difficult it was to sew in a straight line before).  But we are pleased with them (well, I will be once I've got over the critical-of-my-own-work stage).  The kitchen sounds so different now that they are up and it does brighten the place up a bit (it is fairly dark and north-facing).

So, here they are ....