Home Dec!

Renee here and I want to talk about crafts. More specifically sewing. Most specifically home dec. Now I have only sewed sparingly since our move last summer but what I have done has been quality. And it has been home dec so I get to look at it all the time. I wanted to catch you guys up on the home dec, particularly my most crafty of friends Bonnie and Libby. These are two extremely crafty women I met while working at spark. Bonnie is all kinds of crafty and Libby is a sewing master. She taught me to sew. I mean, I could use a sewing machine pretty much my whole life but Libby taught me to properly cut fabric and follow a pattern. And never cut paper with my sewing scissors I hope you guys don’t do that. As an aside, somehow in the move I lost my sewing shears and dave got me another pair of super fancy gingher shears on ebay for like $20. Basically anyone can afford beautiful scissors for fabric only and I strongly recommend buying them. Okay, so Libby taught me to sew and I think she taught Bonnie a thing or two about appliqué. Libby has a blog about her sewing/teaching adventures. Does Bonnie have a blog? I could go on and on about these two hip hip kitties forever but basically what you need to know is they are artisans. Possibly not even in training. So I met up with the two of them in boston a month or so ago and I was so excited to talk to them about my home decin’ because they are crafty and Bonnie just moved and Libby was talking about moving to. But the conversation was limited because I didn’t have pictures which are pretty much essential. So here is the story of our house of fabric with pictures.

It all started with curtains in our guest bedroom. I poured over (web) pages and pages of fabric to select the perfect pattern for our curtains. Dave and I were pretty torn about what to get in terms of type of fabric, motif, and color. In the end we settled on this fabric from reprodepot. It worked out really well because they accidently sent us our order twice so we were also able to make a long curtain for the closet. These are lined with plain muslin. The look lovely but do not do a great job of keeping the room dark at night.

Next came duvets. I ordered fabric at the same time for the duvet for our bed and the one in the guest room. For the guest room we were going for the feeling of an earthy sanctuary. We selected a dark chocolate brown corduroy which is really exquisite and very relaxing. It was also ridiculously cheap from fabric.com. The underside is a fuzzy white flannel. I struggled with the zipper installation but it is relatively functional. This was my first project on such a large scale and it was very frustrating to work with huge pieces of fabric, trying to line them up perfectly, especially because the cord and flannel stuck together like Velcro.

For our bed we wanted something that would make us feel energized in the morning but was not so vibrant that we couldn’t sleep at night. I knew I wanted to combine two fabrics that where only somewhat related. This is a look I love. I do not like matching. That is a look I do not love. So again I poured over fabrics, sending dave potential combos and we decided on this. They are both amy butler fabrics. The underside is a fuzzy navy flannel. It was originally an off white broad cloth but I hated it so I ripped it out. This was more tricky because I had to join four huge pieces of fabric for the front verses the two for the brown one. Luckily I had more experience at this point and everything worked out well, including the zipper.

Finally I would like to present our shower curtain. I am not sure it is my favorite project but it seems awfully popular with out guests. It is a heather ross fabric and was unbelievably simple to make. I seamed two pieces of the fabric together to make one piece then I just hemmed all of the edges and made 12 button holes across the top for the rings which I busted open with my seam ripper. The sewing machine actually made the button holes with its fancy button hole foot. It has a slot for your button and sizes according to that. I didn’t have a button so I used a penny and it worked perfectly. At this point I was pretty accustomed to the big fabric and this was a breeze! I am going to make shower curtains for housewarming prezzies from now on.

We still need curtains in our bedroom. I ordered more of the corduroy from the guest bed duvet for our bedroom curtains since it was so inexpensive and I loved it so much. Dave and I want no light to sneak in so we thought they would be perfect. Fabric.com allowed me to place the order and get very excited and attached to the idea of these curtains before coming back days later and saying they couldn’t fulfill my order! I emailed back and asked why and they replied that it could be for any number of reasons. I emailed again and expressed my disappointment. This was months ago and I still haven’t found anything else I liked nearly as much with our price range so we are living with the gold polyester curtains that came with out apt. a while longer.