I can’t believe I spent the past 3 years waking up and going to sleep staring at dusty white miniblinds in my bedroom.
Recently I decided to finally get rid of those miniblinds. Over the course of a month or so, I searched for vintage curtains on Etsy. Since they’re for my bedroom, I wanted some semi-sheer curtains to let in light plus some more opaque curtains to shut out the light and give more privacy.
I also needed the curtains to play nicely with the current decor in my bedroom. My decorating style is to buy things I really adore and trust they’ll go together. But I put a little bit more thought into the curtains. I wanted vintage, beautiful, and not plain. And they couldn’t fight with some of the more modern art in the bedroom, and certainly not with the pale pink paint on the walls.
After several different search sessions on Etsy, I still couldn’t find what I was looking for. That’s when I remembered a lot of vintage yardage that I bought at the Alameda Flea Market several years ago. I pulled out the fabric, looked at it in the context of my bedroom, and realized it was perfect!
The yardage was hemmed on both sides and happened to be the perfect width for the windows. It was a continuous length of more than 5 yards, so I needed to cut and sew the two curtain lengths with top and bottom borders and curtain tape. Utilizing one of the ideas from my Sustainable Sewing online course, I decided to sew the curtains using only materials I currently had in my stash. That led me to using a random length of burlap in lieu of curtain tape.
The perfect outer curtains were ready, with zero extra investment other than my time and sewing skills. Hooray!
I still needed the inner, more sheer curtains. I’d searched on Etsy many times for those as well. I wanted vintage cotton lace, with some design in it, and no polyester, and it was harder to find than I expected. During one search, I saw a pair I really liked which was pricier than I’d usually pay. But the outer curtains were done, so I bit the bullet and purchased the lace curtains, figuring I still got away with a very affordable curtains solution.
I love my new bedroom curtains SO MUCH.
Daytime
They look so nice with the cutest lampshade ever made.
I’m never going to tolerate dusty white miniblinds again!
Read all the posts in my Secondhand September series
