Curtain Up

Last week I finally hung the new curtains in our living room. We bought a curtain pole and some finials which match the pattern on our fireplace soon after we moved into the flat. For a year and a half they sat, propped up against the wall, their only useful moments being when we cooked sausages and a long pole was needed to silence the smoke alarm. In an optimistic fit of New Year resolve we bought some curtain fabric in the January sales and since then I have been trying to make curtains out of it. At times it has felt like going into battle with the voluptuous quantities of fabric and liner.

The saleswoman in the John Lewis fabric department was very excited about my desire to make the curtains myself. "Ooh, you're young," she said. "You'll always make your own curtains in the future after doing this." I think I was seduced because she called me young, so I set about the task with great vigour. I decided that I wanted curtains that dropped from above the window right to the floor. I wanted a dramatic, opulent look in the room. Also, there was a lumpy bulge in the wall beneath the window that I wanted to cover up. All this meant that the curtains would be significantly bigger than me. They had the upper hand size wise. Wrangling around seven metres of fabric proved to be a significant challenge. Most awkwardly I had to move a lot of the furniture out of the living room in order to provide the only space big enough to cut the fabric and lay out the curtains side by side to match the pattern repeats between them. For those readers keen to eradicate bingo wings and improve upper body strength I recommend curtain making. My poor muscles had never ached so much. Coupled with the pain of sore, pricked and bleeding hands from all the pinning and tacking I had to do, I was in pretty bad shape throughout the process.

It wasn't just me that was feeling the physical strain of the task in hand either. My ancient, secondhand Singer Stylist sewing machine had not been used for some time before it was pressed into curtain making service. Actually I had been keeping it in the living room as a kind of symbolic act since we moved in, trying to show visitors that I was somehow in the process of properly dressing the window in that room. The last thing I sewed, come to think of it, was a draught excluder for a bedroom in our old rented cottage. I bought a load of cheap pink cotton and made it in the shape of a penis. I still have it - I use it to frighten some of our more delicate friends with. Anyway, after making that I carefully cleaned the machine and oiled it before putting it away. This meant that when I got it going again for the curtains it emitted gentle puffs of smoke for a while, presumably as the old oil burned off the newly heated up motor. The smoke stopped after a couple of sewing sessions, but the strong smell of sewing machine oil persisted. There was a certain heady atmosphere pervading the flat whenever I sewed. Luckily the machine held up for the entire project and still seems to be going strong.

Overall it took me four months of spare-time sewing to finish the curtains. I received some very helpful advice from the lady in John Lewis, looked up how to do some things on the internet and worked out the rest myself. I probably could have finished the job more quickly, but frankly there were some times when I just didn't want to look at the damn curtains, let alone sew them. A fine example of this would be when I had to sew on and unpick the heading tape over and over because I couldn't get the thread tension right on the machine. Now, though, they look fantastic. I even made three matching cushion covers out of the same fabric to go with them, and I get the pleasure of telling everybody that I made them. The living room looks great and I reckon that, despite all the effort it took, I would definitely make curtains again. It was worth it. I became even more proud of my soft furnishings when I happened upon an episode of "Kirstie's Homemade Home" on Channel 4 the other day. Kirstie Allsop was going into raptures because she'd made a cushion all by herself, then she promptly turned around and commissioned a professional curtain maker to finish the job and dress all the windows in her fancy holiday home. Having made my own curtains I felt extremely superior. I've earned my home furnishing spurs the hard way... and I didn't feel the need to make a t.v. show about it, so there.