Procrastinator's Guide to Making Curtains

An easy tutorial on how to make and install bedroom curtains:

1. Go to fabric shop and purchase 6 yards of blackout fabric and six yards of curtain fabric.

2. Decide curtain fabric won't work in bedroom; make living room curtains with it instead.  Mess up. Try to fix mistake (this will be the subject of a different post, if I ever get around to fixing the curtains).

3.  Spend two weeks researching how to make roller shades and trying to find the component parts.

4. Spend a half hour at hardware store considering purchasing cheap shades, ripping the fabric off and replacing it with the black out fabric.

5. Decide step 4 is stupid and wasteful.

6. Continue shopping for one week, and find curtains on clearance that will match the bedroom, but are far too long.

7. Purchase curtains with intent to hem them to fit.

8.  Leave curtains in stack on dresser for two weeks (this step is very important!).

9.  Finally decide to purchase a curtain rod.

10.  After browsing online for a couple of days, go to store and purchase two double curtain rods, as well as clips for the blackout curtains.

11.  Immediately install curtain rods with brackets three inches from edge of windows, rather than the recommended six inches.  Note: installation of rods includes swearing and repeatedly moving toddler out of the way.

12.  Make blackout fabric into curtains (this involves exactly one cut per curtain and no sewing).

13.  Hang blackout curtains.  Realize that using only one piece of fabric when there is a center bracket in the curtain rod means that the curtain can only be opened by bunching it together in the middle.

14.  Procrastinate fixing it.

15.  Hang the too long curtain from rod, suddenly understand why instructions say to hang the brackets six inches from the window.

16.  Decide that rather than un-installing the bracket, you will just lengthen the rod and hang part of the fabric outside the bracket (it works).

17.  Now that the curtain is hanging, measure the length and determine where to cut.

18.  Take curtain down and put on living room floor, until the toddler starts walking on it.  Then move it to the couch.

19. Wait five days for Ryan (or whoever in your household has the capability of cutting a straight line) to cut the fabric.

20.  I don't know.  We're still on step 19.