A couple sewing projects

Remember I said in the month of July I was going to focus on my "no $$$" projects? Well I sat down with my sewing machine and I got a couple of those projects finished this weekend.

A while ago, I purchased these 100% linen drapes from IKEA for our master bedroom:


They are only $50 a pair, and I bought two pairs for a total of $100.

I'll be honest... the quality is not that great. The linen is very thin and very stiff and wrinkles very easily. But I still moved forward with my project of pinch pleating and hemming them. It was a pain in the ass!

Here is the final product:





They are still a bit wrinkled after I ironed them with heavy starch!! Hopefully the wrinkles will fall. But overall, I'm happy content with how they turned out. However, this is what I WISH they looked like:

[via Urban Grace Interiors]

BUT I decided to go the "budget" route and use my dollars elsewhere. Custom linen pinch pleated and lined drapes are very expensive. My curtain panels were only $25 each! I'll save my dollars for the bathrooms that need to be updated!

Our bedroom is almost complete, I just need to paint a mirror I have and hang it over the dresser, and make some art for the opposite wall.

I have plans to walk you through my (very easy) steps to pinch pleat store-bought curtains, but the linen panels were not good to use as examples because the fabric was so unforgiving. I will be doing the same thing to these 100% cotton panels from IKEA in our living room:


I've already played around with them and they look a lot better than the linen ones.. I can't wait to share with you!

I also sewed up some pillows for our family room. Two of these:



And this large blue solid pillow for the chaise:


Overall it was a good weekend! Happy Monday :)

How To Sew a Skirted Table

First I'd like to preface by saying to tackle this project you must be somewhat familiar with a sewing machine and basic sewing skills. However, all you really need to know is how to sew in a straight line!

This project is fairly easy but time consuming. It may not be the best way to do it, but I searched all over the internet to find tutorials but found none. So I decided to just wing it and used common sense. Before I go into the details, it's pretty much just sewing 9 rectangles together (four sides, a top, and four corner pieces).

First, you need to figure out what to use as your table. I knew I wanted something large and tall just like this from Wisteria:



They sell the base for it, which looks like this:



I thought about purchasing it but it was too wide and way too expensive. $150 just for the base! I thought about making something myself, but I didn't want to go that route. So when my dad the engineer was here over Christmas, we took off to IKEA to find something that would work. After searching the entire store with measuring tape, we found this:


It was perfect! The small EXPEDIT for only $40. The best part - it has shelves for storage so we can tuck magazine and books in it.

Okay let's begin!