{Home Decor} Drop Cloth Curtains & Fabric Giveaway!

For a loooooooong time I had no idea what to do with the windows in my kitchen. I'd never had large windows near the eating area, so our last house called for no decorative solutions. When we moved into our current house, the owners had simply screwed an entire set of eye hooks into the wall and scrunched up some fabric with an excessive amount of raffia to create a make-shift curtain that ran across the top. So, for the time being, I re-calibrated the fabric into swags and tied with single pieces of raffia to keep it in place.

The fabric wasn't killing me so much, except that it was too much red/orange in one area with the red kitchen walls and I wanted something a little more large scale for the windows. So I ignored the curtains (naturally), and replaced the little chandelier lampshades with some canvas zebra versions I found on mega-sale at Stein Mart. (We're talkin' like .78 cents apiece. Booyah.)

But seeing as how this still didn't solve my problem with curtains, I was in a pickle. What I really, really, really wanted were shutters. Dark brown mahogany shutters, to be exact, because I thought they'd just look so rich and beautiful in that space. Shutters were not in our budget, though, and in retrospect might have been too heavy an option since it's a small kitchen nook and doesn't get enough light as it is.

Source: Home Design Gallery

Source: Country Living

So it was back to the curtain-hunt. I wanted a neutral tone, sorta tan, with a structured but lightweight fabric. Pottery Barn had some options I would have loved to spring for, but Pottery Barn didn't have them on sale either. Drat. Then after seeing this post on The Lettered Cottage blog, I was sold! Drop cloth curtains! I picked up five canvas 6X9 foot painters drop clothes at Lowe's for $9.99 each.

My mom and my mother-in-law were both in town for our Christmas party at the house and after offering to help get things ready, I shamelessly enlisted them to help me pin, sew and trim hemlines for the curtains! (Because apparently I like to save these sorts of projects for the hours right before we have 30+ guests. It totally makes sense, I know.)

We made a great team and knocked out the project in two days. When it was all said and done, I think we took about five inches off the top and seven inches off the bottom—for a total foot—to get them short enough that they puddled a bit on the floor. (I wanted them to reach all the way to the tile to give the illusion of larger windows.)

I'd had curtain rods at the ready from months prior when I found a bronze set at TJ Maxx for less than $20 apiece. So we ran the makeshift hem through the curtain bars and hung them up. Out of the five drop cloths I bought, we only needed four—but the fifth makes for a fantastic outdoor table cloth for our patio parties!

I didn't feel like they needed much in the way of a tassel, so I used bits of jute to tie them loosely until they take their own shape and can hang untied from the rods. (They were kind of stiff at first and kept creeping toward the middle of the rod.)

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and at a much cheaper cost than I'd originally planned for! Plus, of all the fabric stores I scoured, this was the perfect material I'd been searching for. Never would've thunk it.

But now I've got the material leftover that once hung across the tops of the windows, and I'm going to give it away! It'd make for a great long, rectangular pillow or two, place mats, decorative ties, etc. There's several yards of it and the fabric is thick and cut into two very long pieces.

Just leave a comment on this post—with your email so I can contact you!!—between now and Saturday midnight, Jan. 21. I'll randomly select a winner and announce on Monday. 

Thanks for reading!