Not everything goes as planned

There I was, sitting on my couch in front of my sewing machine. I had washed and ironed my fabric and talked with my roommate about fabric combinations. I cut out the fabric for two pillows and pinned the first hem. 

I then started to sew. "Whir click click errrr..." Not the right noises at all. This happened a few more times before realizing that I was getting no where fast and becoming increasingly frustrated. 

Decided to call it quits for the night and then began to tackle it the next day. An hour or so later with my machine in pieces. I discovered some pieces of thread that were probably the stem of my problem and managed to clean them out with a combo of seam ripper and tweezers. Since this took another 2 hours I decided to end my evening with my machine in pieces. 

On the third day I managed to put my sewing machine back together (although it took a few tries) without any leftover screws! 

Needless to say, my pillow project is taking a lot longer then expected. All in all I've spent over 4 hours on this issue when I thought I would be sewing pillows. Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow, with my functioning sewing machine, and some finished pillow cases!

Anybody else went to tackle an easy project only to find out you had to repair something, delaying your project?

Bright Sunshiny Day

Most people, myself included, absolutely love bright sunlight.  However, in my last apartment my bedroom was in the basement and the two windows faced west.  Imagine my surprise when the first morning in my new apartment I woke up at 6:30am to a sun-filled room and completely unable to fall back to sleep!

I quickly realized that I would need to update my room with curtains in order to block the sunlight in the wee hours of the morning, and then I would be able to sleep past 6:30am (I don't function well at that hour).  Curtains should be easy, right? right.

Anyone who has shopped for curtains knows how untrue that statement I just typed is.  Curtains can be expensive and there are a ton of options and places to look for them.  After much blog reading as well as pinterest looking I decided to use tablecloths from Target as curtains, discovering them to be much cheaper, washable and they added a nice texture into the room.

After buying the tablecloths, curtain rod and curtain rings with clips (in order to attach my curtains with no sewing needed.  I recognized the second part of my problem.  My ceilings are incredibly high, I'm talking at least 10 feet, closer to 12ft. I know, I know, everyone wants that in their abode - myself included.  What you fail to realize is that being a renter, and having zero closet space in all 3 of my rentals I have failed to acquire a ladder, so how was I supposed to hang my curtains?  Ingenuity. (note: I do not in anyway endorse my method for others, since it's not the safest option out there - I just tried to use what was available to me)

This is my window before I did anything to it, with my supplies on my bed and all my pillows off.  Note the gigantic window, and even though it's the afternoon the sun still streams in.

 In my last place my windows, ceiling and floor were not level at all.  While this made for some great office chair racing, it meant whenever I tried to hang something in my last place it always looked crooked, so this time I made sure my window was fairly level before proceeding.  Also, I was too short to actually see the level so getting this shot meant holding the camera above my head and crossing my fingers.

This is where the ingenuity comes in - I grabbed the ottoman from the family room and put it on my bed platform (my bed is higher up because it has drawers under it) and used this method as a makeshift ladder.  You can see the level up at the top!

The part that wasn't pictured was me using a tape measure to measure 3 inches down from the top of the molding and marking the screw openings with pencil on the molding.

The reason I screwed directly into the molding is because in my last house the walls that I tried hanging curtains on were solid brick with plaster spread directly on top of them.  I didn't have the tools to drill into brick, nor did I want to put unnecessary holes in my walls to see if it was brick underneath.  

 Note: make sure your drill is not in reverse!  I accidentally stupidly switched it to reverse and then had a screaming fit with the drill when I couldn't hang up a bracket for longer then I'd like to admit before finally figuring out what was wrong...

 I was trying to abide by the rule of curtains espoused on other blogs "high and wide" but I didn't want my curtains at the top of the ceiling because that would be a lot of curtain, and my tablecloths were that long.  So I hung them as high as my arms could reach and then extended the curtain rod for the "wide" part.

 I'm also going to encourage everyone to iron their curtains before hanging them up, I hung up one panel and realized it was waaaaaaay too wrinkly and had to take it down to iron -- this is one place where ironing matters.

Yes, the curtains are short.  Right now I like them that way because they don't get all tangled in the pillows while sleeping.  Perhaps I'll decide a bit further down the road that I want longer curtains.  But these were $14/tablecloth and do a great job of blocking out the sun, so I'll stick with them for now.

And that's my latest update to my room - that I've wanted to do since June.  It not only makes it look better and homier in the room but it also allows me to sleep in much later on the weekends.  Win-win situation for everybody!