Drapes

[kate_schaefer]

If you have ever made your own lined drapes with formal headers, I now know that no one can possibly have properly appreciated your work. I applaud you. I don't even need to see the drapes you made in order to know that you deserve applause.

Comments

[holyoutlaw]

From this I conjecture that someone in your household has recently made some lined drapes with formal headers, nor is it Glenn.

[kate_schaefer]

Thanks! The dining room looks significantly better now.

Tangentially, your son beat us all at Quiddler last night. Much hilarity ensued.

[kate_schaefer]

Actually, so far I have only made drape, not drapes. It looks pretty good, much better than the elderly drape it replaced, and eventually it will have friends covering the rest of the window, and the other windows in the living room and dining room.

[vgqn]

I am Impressed!

[kate_schaefer]

Thanks! I am, too, actually. I'll be even more impressed when the whole project is finished in a few months.

[kate_schaefer]

What trips us up is the idea that all the seams are straight seams, so this should be easy. It's straightforward, but not easy, because it's a hell of a lot of fabric.

Tailoring has the advantage that wool really, really wants to do whatever you want it to do, as long as you use the right methods of persuasion. I can't do it any more because I'm allergic to dry cleaning fumes. I miss working with wool.

[scarlettina]

I'm impressed, too. Sewing is a thing with which I have, at best, a nodding acquaintance, and I'm always impressed with what my needle-able friends are capable of.

[kate_schaefer]

Thanks! Back at ya about the jewelry; I always think, oh, I could do that! But so far, it turns out that I can't.

I mean, in theory, I could climb Everest, too, but so far, it turns out that I can't manage to go backpacking on Rainier.

(Kate wanders off, mumbling about other tangential analogies...)

[akirlu]

I salute you for making the start. I have the bolt of fabric for drapes, and a separate bolt of heavy lining material, both of which were gotten around the time we bought the house. I never gave serious consideration to making them with pinch-pleated tops or those weird, fatally pointy drapery pins to attach the pinch pleats to mechanical drapery drawing hardware because OMG. I remember when my grandmother made new drapes for our house in San Jose and nearly forty years later, I still think that was close enough to that process to suffice. But even having decided to go with curtain rings that clip to the top of plain panels, I still haven't tackled the project lo these more than five years later, even though I painted the living room walls to match the drapes I still haven't made. I keep stalling at figuring out where I'm going to lay out that much fabric.

[kate_schaefer]

Pinch-pleating turns out to be relatively easy with pleater tape, though attaching the pleater tape to the drapes is one of the not-as-easy-as-one-thought tasks. The pleater tape puckers. A lot. Once it's attached, the pleater pins go into the slots, and there you are. My back hurts, but the drape is up. The pleater pins aren't as pointy as the scary pins from the old drapes.

I didn't lay out any of the fabric. My drapes are dupioni sillk and the lining is a relatively lightweight cotton, so I ripped the fabric rather than cutting it.

If that project reaches the top of your list, I'll salute you, too.