New Bedroom Curtains

I mentioned about a week ago that our bedroom is featured in Apartment Therapy's "My Bedroom Retreat" contest.  Recently I've been working on a few changes to the bedroom. One of them is a set of new curtains.  I'm not the greatest seamstress in the world, and I don't have a fancy sewing machine, but curtains are just about the easiest thing you can sew.  If you would like to sew curtains for your windows there are many great tutorials you can find around the web. 

You may remember from last week's post that the curtains we had in our bedroom were bright white.

I like these curtains, but there were a few problems with them.  First of all they don't cover the windows.  We have really long windows in our house, and we need four panels to get full coverage.  For these pictures, I took the other two panels off.  There are kind of an ugly brownish, yellowish color.  The second problem is that they let a little too much light in for my liking.

Lately I've been craving more pattern and color, and I found exactly what I was looking for at my favorite fabric shop, The PA Fabric Outlet.

I wrote that curtains are easy to make, and they are, but these curtains did cause me a few problems.  I added the border to the bottom.  The fabric outlet only had ten yards of this fabric, and I needed about twelve.  That's one reason that I added the border.  I also think it helps this heavy floral to seem a little more modern.  Here's a closer look at the pattern.



Remember this image that I posted in my first blog post?

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My new curtains remind me a little bit of these curtains.  Here's a closer look at the border.

The other trouble I had with these curtains came when I discovered that my curtain rod is not straight.  It sinks in the middle, so I had to measure the panels on the rod to make sure I hemmed them evenly.  Through this process I discovered how to sew with a blind hem stitch on my machine. 

I highly recommend making your own curtains.  Find a fabric outlet where you can get discounted fabric, and get to work!  If I would have bought these curtains they would have been at least twice as expensive as making them.  Get sewing!

I'm linking up at Liz Marie Blog's Inspire Me Please Linky Party!

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Entryway Ideas

Entryway, landing strip, call it whatever you like, everyone needs a spot in their home  to drop and sort things when they come in.  Different houses have different types of layouts.  We enter our house through the kitchen so that's the most logical place for us to set up an entryway.  Our house does not have a designated "mudroom."  Here is some inspiration I've found around the web.

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Do you have an entryway?  A mudroom?  How do you keep your things organized when you come into the house?   Which one of these pictures is your favorite?

Our Bedroom Featured!

Hello!  Apartment Therapy is having a contest called "My Bedroom Retreat."  I thought it would be a great opportunity to test out my new camera and practice staging a room.  I was so excited that they accepted my our room for the contest.

I could only submit five pictures for the contest.  Here are a few more of my favorite shots.



It would be great if you could head over to AT and favorite my room for the contest!  See my profile here.

I have some new curtains in the works for this room that I can't wait to share!

What do these pictures have in common?

Like every other blogger out there, I love collecting pictures and links that I find around the internet on Pinterest.  I probably have a few hundred pictures of home decor pinned.  This week I decided to choose my very favorite design pictures and put them together in one board.  I thought that I might be able to look at the pictures and see what it is that I'm really drawn to in design.

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Take a look at my board and let me know what themes you notice.



Dresser Turned Buffet

When I was directing the high school musical one year, we needed a dresser for one of the scenes, so one of my students brought one in.  I would tell her how much I liked the dresser, and when the show was over she said, "my mom said if you like it so much, you can keep it."  Well, that was nice, but I really didn't have a place for it until about a year and a half ago when I got married.  It is a nice piece of furniture, but it was definitely in need of some tlc.

This is the only before picture I have.  It was missing some hardware and had a blonde finish with the details painted in blue.  I decided to sand down the top and stain it and paint the rest of it a glossy black.  Here's how it turned out.

Detail on the top.



It was too bad I couldn't use the original hardware.  The most difficult part of this process was trying to find hardware to fit.  I ordered a set of knobs from eBay that I really liked, but because the drawers were so thick, I couldn't find any screws that would fit.  I ordered this set of knobs which I also like and had to get metric screws.  I still need to get some washers to tighten some of the knobs.