Sew what!?

If you read my crazy eights posting down below, you know that one of things that I'm not real good at is sewing. My mom is an awesome seamstress. She made my prom dresses, and many clothes for me growing up. She can sew up just about anything. My Mother-in-law; also an awesome seamstress. AND she has one (actually two!) of those awesome embroidery machines so she's got quite the wonderful little sewing room that is often buzzing. She makes some super cute personalized stuff for the girls.

Me, sewing... not so great. Mom says I didn't want to learn, I'm not sure I believe that. I wish now that I knew how to sew as good as these two women, but I get by.

I'm in major "redecorate" the house mode. Mom always said I had "steak taste with a hamburger budget" and that still rings true today. But I'm slowly changing things / decorating things in the house, one $30 project at a time.

And in case you didn't know this about me, when I get an idea to do something, I want to do it IMMEDIATELY. I decided several months ago that I wanted to paint a wall in the kitchen. I drove to Lowe's that morning and bought the stuff, taped it off after lunch, and had it painted during nap time before Matt even got home.

Another wild-hair moment hit today. I wanted to do something with the windows in the family room. This is what it looked like:


This is what it has looked like for 10 years. Well, the walls were white until about 6 years ago. We actually would close these windows off and have custom built floor-to-ceiling shelves put in on each side of the fireplace if we could afford it, but we can't.

I saw in the Target ad that they had long panels on sale for $9/each, and they were wide enough (and the windows narrow enough) that I theoretically only needed two. So Hannah and I stopped at Target today. This is what the panels looked like:


I didn't think plain ol brown would look good on a brown wall, and wanted to do something to "embellish" them. I remembered this fabric that I had bought several years ago. I was going to make Roman Shades for these windows...but I didn't know how and never figured it out. So I had all of this:


I decided to do a triangle panel across the top and a section across the bottom. I cut and pinned my little heart out, dusted off the sewing machine, and got busy during nap time. When Matt got home and caught me in the midst of sewing, I simply said "I'm making curtains. In a little while you are going to hang some cafe-rods in the family room for me and you're not going to bitch about it." He followed those orders quite well today actually!

So the finished product I think turned out pretty decent. It's warmer than it was (albeit a bit darker but I don't care. The other wall has huge windows on it that I can open the blinds on). I have a lot of the fabric left so I may try to do a valance on the other window, or make some new pillows, but nonetheless, today's wild hair has been trimmed and taken care of.

Whatcha think?