Clark has set us a goal to accomplish something towards preparing for the arrival of the boy each weekend. Last weekend it was preparing the bassinet – it had to be washed and checked over etc, as it had been stored in a shed since Princess was a baby. And clean out the mammoth accumulation of un-filed paperwork that had been cluttering our work surfaces for the last nine or so months. So we actually did manage to get that done last weekend.
This weekend’s task was curtains for the nursery. I was somewhat dubious as to whether we were going to actually get that organised, but we were going to give it a go. K’s mum had made a big temporary blackout curtain for little J’s room, but has since made them a proper roman blind so we inherited the blackout curtain, which is a very nice deep blue.
After some measurement and discussion we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to be big enough for the two windows in the nursery. So in our infinite wisdom and complete lack of experience we thought we would get some more material and make up some curtains. We have a sewing machine – it can’t be that hard…
Scoff if you will – and our friend Bec who we visited yesterday with tiny 8 day old little JDT (what a cutie!) certainly looked skeptical when we announced this plan – but you know what – we actually did it. That was our very exciting Saturday night.
We had to dig out the instructions for the sewing machine to work out how to wind the bobbin and thread the machine, but it seemed that we had both absorbed enough information from watching our mothers sew as small children that we just did it. Without tears or swearing or any negativity at all.
We didn’t even bother to try and match the same fabric, or even the same colour – we decided that a contrasting colour would probably be a safer bet. We found a nice tan/beige that worked well and as an added bonus was on sale, and got some curtain rods and brackets.
And the curtains turned out quite well. They are all the same length, and look nice and uniform, and the colours do go together. The only fatal flaw was that we didn’t realise that the pin holes would be quite so obvious, but Clark thinks it just adds character, and I think that given the fact that neither of us had really done anything of this nature before, a few pinholes in an otherwise good product is a pretty damn good achievement.
It makes me proud that we can be this independent, we don’t have to rely on our parents (just as well we don’t) or anyone else, we can do it for ourselves.
More photos of the whole process, as well as many other new photos, on our Flickr page
PBX makes four 