The family has gone, and the house reassembled, so, obviously, it’s time to start sewing again! Several things were left unfinished after a mad final quarter in 2008 when I was frantically filing and organizing the house. On Friday, I got them done.
First was this small valance for the upstairs bathroom. Neither of us is entirely crazy about having this wonderful print on a wall, exactly, but it does fit the personality of our 1952 bathroom just fine:
In keeping with my new-found resolution to use up as much stash as possible, the curtain is lined with a sheet that’s been kicking around, allegedly as ‘muslin’, for a few years. Instead of sewing a rod pocket across both fabrics, I attached the main fabric to the lining with enough of a seam allowance in the lining to allow me to make a pocket for the rod in in the lining alone.
Making the pocket rod a little snug keeps the valance in place (no lining creep in the top), and lets the main fabric fall directly from the rod. Unless a curtain is gathered, I really don’t like the way the rod pockets (and stitching) look when you can see them from the front.. This was a good way to keep the focus on the print, not on the construction.
(Yes, that’s an awful line on the blinds where my hand-cleaning stopped. It turns out that you CAN remove 30 years of accumulated dirt from fragile blinds — you just have to go very slowly, one slat at a time. I’ll be getting back to that one of these days. I got distracted by all the more necessary blinds that were breaking, and thus in dire need of immediate attention, on the other twenty-six windows in the house.)