I posted a few weeks back, asking if I had enough fabric for curtains that my MIL wanted me to make. I just left the fabric lie here until last Saturday when I decided to get to work and get it over with. They took 5 hours but they are done :)

I ended up doing the valances just one thickness (good thing, too because the fabric was used previously to decorate a table at Vacation Bible School and I found two faded Kool-Aid stains on the one side!) and didn't line them. If they were my curtains or MIL had offered to help out or something, I would have lined them but that wasn't happening. I figured that the fabric doesn't look THAT different from the back (just looks like a lightly faded pattern compared to the front). She's putting them over top of bamboo blinds and when they are rolled up during the day, the valances will not be seen from outside.

No big deal....

Since I was only doing them one thickness, it left lots of fabric and I didn't have to worry about splicing pieces together, repeating patterns or anything of the sort. That made it easy! However, the curtains could not be longer than 116" since that's the length of the two longest pieces, so they're not as full as they should be (I couldn't times the length by 2.5 or anything like that). I took the 116" piece and subtracted the length of the biggest window, the difference was only 26". I took the length of the other two windows and added 26" to each valance so they will all be the exactly the same and not have one that's fuller than the other since all three windows vary in size.

The valances are not done following any specific rules. They aren't what I would want but I did what I could with what I had and even though MIL thought they would be "simple" to make, it still took 5 hours. I'm going to make sure she realizes it wasn't a 1 hour job or anything like that, it took ALL day! I just hope she likes them. I personally think that the pattern looks EXACTLY like the wallpaper and it will be too much, but it's not my house...LOL. I sound evil...I'm really not, this project just really wore me down!

Oh, any suggestions on how to label the curtains so she knows which one is for which window? The windows are different lengths but they vary from 76" up to 90". I wanted to label them like Left, Middle and End or something but what would you do to label them? (As I was sewing, I used pins to keep them marked, like the longer one had 3 pins in the corner, second longest 2 and the shortest had one). Should I sew a piece a fabric on with the measurements or markings? Mark it with a Sharpie? I do Prim stitcheries so I could sew the measurements or whatever in it to be sure that it doesn't wash away....what about that? I know MIL could tell by just lying them out and seeing which is longest but she won't remember which window cooresponds with each length because they're not in order.

Thanks for everything. Even if I didn't respond back before, just being able to type up my problem and then see the few responses I got, helped me a lot to get my brain to focus on this project!