The curtain that shuts us in

My bedroom is too dark. There is no direct sunlight, for the only "windows" in the room are the frosting sliding glass doors that open into the sunroom. The paint is too dark, so I often complain to Corey that this room gives me seasonal affective disorder. I have already picked out new paint colors for the ceiling, trim and walls. The room is loaded with details - crown moulding, thick baseboards, four doors with trim - and the quote to paint it is $450. So while I wait to have $450 my children don't need or get the nerve and ambition to do it myself, I look for ways to improve the darkness of the bedroom.

When we moved into the house, I put up these thick room darkening curtains in a bold turquoise (one of my favorite colors) that was an exact match to a color used in the bedding. I am aware of the irony in having room-darkening drapes in a room while complaining about it being too dark. The drapes are only pulled on days I get to sleep late.

This "before" picture was taken about three in the afternoon. See? Dark.

So after the living room curtains turned out so spectacular, I decided to continue one of my favorite accents - sea coral (third only to blue and white porcelain and even better, blue and white porcelain monkeys) in one of my favorite colors in the bedroom. If I could cover this dark solid color with something light and printed, I could keep the weekend room-darkening function and bring more light into the room. I also decided I wasn't going to bother with getting my mother to sew them. This was a job for hem tape. Before I commited to the look with tape, I pinned the fabric to one of the blackout panels and hung it for a few days:

Please ignore the suitcase and the unmade bed. I started on this the evening we got back from Jena.

Tonight I spent about two hours ironing and hem-taping and ironing some more, but it's so worth it. They *almost* look better than the curtains in the living and dining rooms, which needed a heavier lining. The blackout curtains make them drape perfectly, and they really do make the room lighter, less heavy.

Hem tape is my friend.

Don't rain on my parade and tell me I'm not the first person to think of sticking some fabric to some existing curtains with a little sixteen yards of hem tape. As far as this blog goes, I did it first and I did it best. I even got the Big Smile from Corey!

In other news (and I'm going to employ this same practice in curtains for the boys' room), yesterday was the last full day of school. It feels so weird to not have an evening full of school shit to do. Today was Landen's awards ceremony and my boy got his third honor roll certificate of second grade AND a certificate of academic excellence in Science AND Spelling. It was his last day of school. Jake's awards ceremony is tomorrow and then we're DONE for the summer. They have five weeks of YMCA summer camp, two weeks of vacation with Mawmaw and Pawpaw, a couple weeks of Daddy Day Care, a few random days thrown in and start at the new school on August 10th. We have a lot of work to do to get Jake ready for a new school, but we have added a crackerjack to the mental health team and hopefully we're going to get a New and Improved Jake-a-boo for St. Jude this fall.

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