Free {repurposed} curtains

We haven't had "real" curtains in our master bedroom, well, ever. I've been working on decorating the bedroom after 4 years of living here, and it's coming along slowly. I painted the room from dusty pink to a nice brown, I painted a CL dresser, we had already bought some Shabby Chic Target furniture from CL, and I bought a lovely duvet cover (have yet to get the comforter, but who am I to be picky?). Everything is quite plain. I got to looking at the naked windows, bemoaning the fact that I don't have a budget to buy ANY supplies right now. Well, I was reading on the Nesting Place about her Lessons Learned from Houses Past, and she was talking about how back in the day she used Kmart bedsheets to make her living room curtains. Inspiration! I checked the closets for any extra sheets, but realized that I had already donated them to our Community Services at our church. Bummer.

After moping around for a while, I walked by the dining room and stopped dead in my tracks.

The tablecloth.

This tablecloth was given to me by my MIL, who bought it at goodwill or something. It's served us well. It's a lovely color of green with some decorative trim type stuff. But it's a solid color. We have a vespers service at our house every Friday night, which includes food for about 15-20 young adults. Solid tablecloths are not my friend. This poor little lovely had grease stains here and there, but I loved the color, so I kept using it. But now I grabbed it off of the table and ran upstairs to the sewing room. Before I could change my mind, I folded it in half and cut it.

Then I folded the raw edge over and over once more to create the rod pocket

I knew that these would not be long enough to do panels, so I decided to make them a swaggy valance thing. For the lift-up tie things (love all my terminology?) I used scraps of cavas left over from my living room curtains. I just cut them into strips, sewed up the long sides to make a tube, then turned the tubes inside out.

I then pressed it down to create crisp edges.

Then I sewed the short sides together to make a loop.

I slipped them over the curtain rod, and voila! New curtain-swaggy-valance thingies.

Oh, and there's another one on the other side of the bed, but that is my husband's side, and it has socks all over the floor. Thought I'd spare you that.

Lesson learned: You can pretty much always find something to repurpose in your house. My curtains were free, and I couldn't be more pleased with the result!

Linking up to Transformation Thursday at

And