Sunshine and flowers

Remember that beautiful linen fabric I fell in love with and bought at Mood in L.A.? I wrote about it in this post back in March. It's been sitting in my sewing room, calling my name, but it hadn't told me yet what it wanted to be. Last night (about 10 minutes before the fabric store closed) I finally understood what it was aspiring to be. Curtains for the kitchen! I ripped one of the old curtains off the wall and eye balled it for just a second to get an idea for the construction. Then quickly made a list in my head, jumped in the car and made it to the store in time to get supplies.

I didn't quite have a wide enough piece of the print for both windows, so I decided to buy black linen to make a 4" wide border on both sides. The next dilemma was lining. I was afraid that if I used black, it would make the white flowers muddy and less crisp looking. On the flip side, if I used white lining, I did not want the black borders to appear lighter or less solid black looking. So I decided on gray lining, but was still I concerned that would end up diminishing booth the white and black portions. I posed the question to a handful of friends who sew and Alisa had the answer. Yellow lining! It was absolutely the right choice.

That was a lot of talk about curtains without even showing them to you, so here's one:

You can't see the second curtain (for the window above the kitchen sink) because I can't count. I was thinking I needed to make 4 ribbons for the ties. There are four per curtain though (two on the front and two on the back) so I ran out of yellow linen. The second curtain is completely ready to go, so I should be able to finish it quickly.

I can't stop wandering into the kitchen to admire this one. The camera just doesn't do the floral fabric justice. The gray area is almost metallic without being silvery. Most of the accessories in the kitchen are red. Darn. Guess I'll have to go shopping for new stuff including fabric to cover the dining room chairs!

As I was taking pictures of the one completed curtain, I noticed that this corner of the dining area seems to have taken on a wine theme. It really isn't a deliberate collection and just sort of happened over time. I don't dislike it, but some new yellow things will need homes here now!