My Victory Over the Curtains

Once upon a time there was a girl named Jelaire. She was in her sixth grade Family and Consumer Science class when each person in the class had to pick a pattern for a pillow to sew. She picked the easiest design to sew: the boxing glove-shaped pillow. The description said that it "teaches practical sewing skills while building self-esteem, reading, and math skills." "Cool," she thought. She knew this would be a breeze.

Much to her dismay, she had such a difficult time sewing the darn thing that she was the only one in her entire class who had to stay after every day to finish it. But the point is is that she DID finish it. After much blood, sweat, and tears, she realized that sewing wasn't worth it and vowed never to do it again. After the pillow was completed, she lived happily ever after...until fifteen years later when she thought she may have to sew again.
To this day, Jelaire has horrible flashbacks when she thinks about sewing. The picture above is a picture of exactly what the pillow looked like (except my initials were on the front).

Well, I tried something that was extremely out-of-my league these past few weeks: I tried to be a creative, but frugal housewife. NOT very easy for someone who has next to ZERO cutesy-creative skills.

When we moved in, every window in the house already had curtain tracks installed above them. We figured, "Hey, why don't we just save money by buying curtains that already can go onto the curtain tracks instead of removing the curtain tracks, buying, and installing different curtain rods?"

Well, AFTER we got the curtains we liked at Walmart for $100 ($25/panel), we realized that because the curtain track was mounted so high on the wall (just below the ceiling), the curtains came to an end about 9 inches off of the ground! It made our living room window and sliding-glass door look like they were wearing high-waters. Very ugly. There had to be an easy way to extend our curtains to the ground, so I checked online. Unfortunately the only thing I could find entailed adding fabric to the curtain, which I did not want to do. Too little time, and too few skills!

Some of the ideas required a sewing machine, but we don't have one of those either. Heck, let's be honest. Even if I did have one, it's not like I'd know how to use the thing.So sewing was out of the question. Don't they say that necessity breeds creativity? Well, it's true. We had gone over a month without curtains in our living room, so here's what we did, and I really liked how it turned out for the price we paid!

1. We installed the pin-hooks onto our curtains.
Our curtains were very sheer/thin up top, and we were afraid that the weight of the curtains would tear through the pins. To reinforce the curtains, we cut up some old fabric and glued it, then ironed it to where we stuck the pins through. We used Liquid Thread, which I got at JoAnn Fabric for like $6 (I think the Liquid Thread glue would normally have worked but our fabric was too sheer, so we gave up on the gluing/ironing part).



2. I bought 2 types of black chain from Lowe's: 1. A bigger swag-type chain, and a smaller, cuter weave-type chain.

We just used pliers to connect them together.

















3. We used fishing line to tie the sliding curtain tracks together because the little plastic tracks would get stuck when we opened and closed the curtains.

So how much money did we really save? Before we had decided what to do, we went to J.C. Penney to see what would cost less. Here was our verdict. Buying the 2 new curtain rods, 4 pinch-pleated curtain panels came out to about $250-$300. Using the curtain tracks already in our house and just buying the chain and curtains came to $140! That means we saved about $150-$250 and I didn't even have to sew! I still haven't had to sew since sixth grade. Victory! Take that, Boxing Glove-Shaped Pillow!