New Curtains

Sewing cafe curtains for our front door was my other main project last weekend while Nate was fishing. I was so productive that my father-in-law thinks Nate should take off more often and "see what happens." Ha ha.
I was glad to get these done, though.
The best part? This whole project was mostly free! Save a spool of thread and a magnetic curtain rod. The sewing machine was a hand-me-down from someone at mom's church, mom bought be all the specs for the machine (bobbins, oil, lube, seem-ripper, etc.), and the fabric came from Nate's trip to Africa a few years ago. So it matches, it was free, and it is special to us.
Months ago my friend Carrie helped me figure out how big I wanted the panels and valances to be (I have another valance to sew for our dining area) and cut everything out. I had it all ready to go!
I bought and printed the manual for the machine, figured out how to thread it, and got to work last Friday night.
Although Nate was gone, as you can imagine, I had help.

This (obviously) didn't last very long:

So I put him on my lap:
He was pretty entertained with the fabric on his head. Turns out yarn isn't the only crafty thing he likes. With sewing there are tiny tools to bat around, thread being pulled and disappearing, machines to figure out, not to mention the fabric itself. Everything is a new toy or bed for Loki (present company included).

I got this part done on Friday:

And the rest on Saturday evening:
We are really pleased with it. It really lightens up this window, and this corner of the house. Before we just had a different and darker panel of African fabric hung up there, so this is a little more "finished."

I didn't take any close-up detailed pictures of the curtains, because the details aren't pretty. I had a really hard time with the corners because this fabric was very silky and I couldn't get it to feed through the machine very gracefully. I'm sure most of it was user error, I'll get it figured out.
Regardless, I'm happy with the final product!