Hello! It's been a while, huh? Sorry 'bout that. Things have been crazy but I just settled in on the couch to watch the Grammys and hopefully get things caught up on this little blog. My husband is on the couch with me for once. This is the first Sunday in the past four weeks that he hasn't flown out of town on Sunday afternoon to spend the better part of the week away. Can I get a hip, hip, hooray?!? I know I keep saying this, but we're in major crunch mode with the beach house. This weekend we tried to wrap up the last of the projects that we were working on so that this week we can start packing things up. It's so exciting that this time is finally here! I do have a couple last projects to share with you this week before bombarding you with pictures of the finished house next week.
This weekend's main goal was to get the curtains finished up. My mom had finished all the sewing for the bedrooms and was down to just the curtain panels for the living/dining rooms when she broke her finger. Yep, slammed it right in the car door. She's down a fingernail and has her right pointer finger in a splint so I was afraid I was going to have to tap in to finish up the sewing. Luckily, she managed to sew up the last few sides even with her bum hand so I never had to sit behind the sewing machine. UNluckily, though, she can't really use scissors so after the sewing was done, it was up to just me to finish them up.
Now, for all the bedrooms, once the sewing was done, that meant the curtain panels were complete because we're just hanging them from the little rings that have clips. Easy peasy. For the dining/living rooms, we decided to try out grommets. We've never done curtain panels using grommets before, but my Aunt Kim told us we could do it so we went for it. The first panel was obviously the hardest since we had to really measure out the placement of each grommet, but after that we could use it as a guide for the other panels.
We marked off the placement on the back of the panel.
The smaller circle, above, is from the inside of a grommet on the first panel. The bigger circle is actually the size hole we needed to cut, though, so we just centered our stencil over the smaller hole.
Because I was going to cut the hole out of two layers of fabric, I pinned all around the circle first. I didn't want things sliding around and getting all wopperjawed while I cut. Cutting the circle wouldn't have been hard at all if there wasn't so much fabric attached to it! I couldn't really maneuver it around to cut easily so that was tricky.
Once the hole is cut, the rest is super easy. We used plastic grommets and didn't have any problems with them at all. They came in packs of eight and that's how many we put on each panel. First, I placed the bottom half under the fabric.
The other half of the grommet has little teeth on it that keep the fabric pinned in.
Then it was just a matter of lining them up and snapping them together. Not gonna lie, I kinda had to throw my body weight into it to get them to snap shut.
Here's how it looks after snapping it together.
You really can't tell it's plastic. At least I don't think so. Here's a completed panel with 8 grommets. It's folded in half in this picture.
Not a hard process at all, just very time consuming. Did I mention that there were ten panels? With 8 grommets each? Yea, you can do that math...I had to cut EIGHTY holes. Gah! It took forever. Does anyone else think it's weird that my mom broke her finger just in time to miss out on all this fun? Well played, Mom. Well played.