Sometimes, life doesn’t go quite the way you expect nor hope.

Sort of like many of my sewing and painting projects, which of late have proven to be both blessing and curse. A blessing when you are able to make a nice homemade personalised gift for a friend. [Insert nice picture of tweed patchwork quilt or nappy pouch, recently made but hastily dispatched before being able to take a picture]. A curse when you realise you don’t actually know what you are doing, or why the project is going so wrong.

Such is the case with my latest curtain escapade. Having contracted with myself never to do any more curtains after the drama of the living room ones (still unfinished), somehow i ended up doing another set for the bedroom. It’s the gift of those rose tinted glasses i often wear. i was thinking, it’s surely just a matter of cutting out some big rectangles and sewing them together. And these ones don’t even require the tricky business of joining panels together, so its gonna be a cinch. What can go wrong? Ha!

I found this luscious charcoal velvet on ebay, and some good quality lining fabric. Cutting out went swimmingly. To sew the linings, you make a big tube out of the outer and inner fabrics, turn it inside out, and then sew on the heading tape at the top, and hem the bottom. What i was blissfully unaware of was the difficulty in sewing some very heavy fabric, namely velvet, to some lighter fabric, the lining. Enter: Tension Problem. No amount of twiddling the blessed dials on my machine would allow me to successfully make these two fabrics happy bedfellows. Whilst the velvet would create a tight stitch, the lining would do the opposite, resulting in a twisted mess that hung at about 30 degrees from the traditional vertical inclination of an obedient curtain. After about 5 sewing and ripping out sessions, i bundled the haberdashery offenders up in my sewing room and forgot about them for a few weeks until inspiration hit: forget sewing them together, just join them at the top and leave the two hanging separately.

This proved a success and after a short stint at the machine i was hanging my velvet curtains like we were best of friends. Here they are looking swanky in our bedroom.

Staying with the charcoal theme, i decided to paint the shelves at the end of our bed in a similar moody hue. I have previously lauded Farrow & Ball paints here before, and in this latest project I was busy congratulating myself on my daring choice of “Downpipe’ eggshell. Especially as the subject was this beautiful handmade oak shelving unit, which could have easily contented itself in it’s former unadulterated solid wood state.

This didn’t last, once i realised that failing to use the appropriate primer underneath (a cost-saving initiative on my part) affects the finish and drying time of F&B paints. These shelves took around 4 days to dry, and even now my delicately placed trinkets tend to stick fast to the surface.

Here we have shelf one decorated by me, with pointless items such as vintage shoe inserts and bricks. Shelf two is carefully crafted by Malkie, with items such as…. shoes?! What daring functionality!!