project fail: drop cloth curtains

Hello all!

I'm back with a big ol' project fail. I really wanted to get this post out before the year was over, but oh well! The project technically was successful, it just didn't look good in the space it was intended for. I still wanted to show it in case someone was considering something similar!

I wanted new curtains in my den, and I really wanted them to be green to tie in the green wall color from the dining room. Since I was having no luck finding any off the shelf, I decided to make some of my own! First off, I bought a drop cloth at Home Depot.

I found a paint color that was super close to the walls in the dining room. Score!

I knew I wanted a pattern, and I decided stripes would be easy. Therefore I would need another color since I didn't want to have the drop cloth color showing. I bought both the Brushed Metallic Satin Champagne paint and Gloss Celery paint. I decided the Champagne paint would be the way to go.

I placed the drop cloth flat on the driveway. I'm sure most people iron the cloth first. From the picture below, you can see I did this during the bar stool project and first frames for the tiny art wall, so I did not take the time to iron.

It worked out OK though. I used the folds in the fabric as my stripe lines. I started with the champagne spray paint. I intentionally left a longer side on the bottom side so it could be folded over to make a slot for the curtain rod.

Then I taped off both sides of the stripes.

I also taped down newspaper to prevent the paint from going onto the champagne stripe.

And I finished up on the other side. It was quite a blustery day, which is why I did one side and then the other. The wind thought it was funny to blow the drop cloth over 37 times along with carrying the newspaper pages across the yard.

Almost finished with all three at this point!

The paint was solid enough for my liking. I started to run out towards the end, but the bottom part would be covered by the couch, so it was fine with me.

At this point, I walked the cloth inside to see the coloring. The champagne was way too dark. I decided to go over it with celery paint, hoping it would lighten up.

There wasn't a huge difference. Oh well. Let's see what it looked like inside!

Pardon the mess. I couldn't visualize if it would look alright hung up or not, so I figure I'd go for it. I folded the curtain in half and cut it. I decided I would sew it later with the sewing machine I was hoping to get for Christmas.

Then I really rigged it up: duct tape. I just folded over the top part and taped it. Classy, eh? Again, I would sew it with the soon to arrive sewing machine.

Not too shabby, thus far. It definitely needed some touch ups, but I didn't want to continue if it was going to look bad...

Eek! The spray paint is obvious! I decided to wait until the sun went down before I made my final decision.

And my decision: project fail.

The grayish stripe was suppose to be more gold colored. It may have worked had I not painted the champagne spray paint on there. Then the cream color of the drop cloth might've matched the couches.

My intention was to get a double curtain rod, and have white curtains underneath with the striped drop cloth on top (hence why I didn't make them very wide). Those light green curtains would have been removed had this project worked. Also, the drop cloth will fold up (create pleats) but the duct tape prevented it here.

I found a lot while googling "painted drop cloth curtains". This one was very similar to what I was going for! These curtains definitely had a more finished look than my hurried project.

Check out the blog entry it's from here!

In better curtain news, I finally found some that I love! They have a great pattern on them, they're green, and they were on sale!! Of course they weren't in stock, so they should be in sometime next week. Here they are:

They're from Z Gallerie! They were a bit more than I wanted to spend (even on sale), but I think they're going to look awesome! The color looked almost identical to the dining room when I was looking at them in the store.. fingers crossed they match when I bring them home!