Musical Drapes

A New Year calls for a fix to our aging draperies. Our house is half a century old, and some of the window hangings appear to be nearly that old. So I bought a couple of panels of new drapes yesterday and since then have been in the midst of swapping curtains around, picking and sewing hems, and getting a head full of dust.

The front living room curtains--custom made from J. C. Penney long ago--are being refurbished. I cut off damaged parts on the ends and sew new edge hems. Hang them up again, and I hopefully get five more years before I have to worry about them again. I'll probably sew new ones then; I like the substantial formal curtains of yesteryear, at least in our formal room.

The old dining room curtains have damaged lining halfway down, so I'm cutting them in half and turning the tops into bathroom curtains. The old bathroom curtains were homemade by the previous owner and are falling apart, so I'll wash that fabric and use it for scrap material for my children.

The new dining room curtains were actually stolen from my husband's den. He didn't realize what nice drapes he was never using anyway. He now has a pair of blue floral curtains (hemmed up greatly because he doesn't care if his drapes skim the floor, which has important papers and computer boxes piled up on it) covering his den window. The blue drapes come from our bedroom, and I've never liked them much. They're not super girly, and they bring out the wheaten color of the den carpet. He might end up using them for decades....

Our bedroom got the new ivory/gold drapes. They could use an ironing job, but I'm waiting to see if taking a shower this afternoon helps them un-wrinkle magically all on their own. Sadly, the gold drapes, though lined, let through more light than the blue floral drapes, so I dug into our material cache and found some very dark blue, thick upholstery fabric that I will turn into a blackout (blue-out?) curtain and hang under the gold drapes.

Finally, I will trash the terrible drapes in our master bathroom. They have awful stains from water condensate that collected on the old aluminum window over the course of many winters. We installed a double-paned, vinyl-framed window in that bathroom this summer, so now I'm going to use a lovely turquoise sarong fabric from Thailand that I've kept safe for 7 years to make a pretty new set of curtains.

(No, our window treatments don't sing. The title of this post is a reference to the game of "Musical Chairs.")