On being proud

Apologies, it's been nearly two weeks!!  In my defence, I guest-blogged over at Leanne's Little Life of Scrap in the meantime.  You should go check her out, she's a working mummy, making and baking lovely things in south London.  And last week she was celebrating her blog's fourth birthday with a whole load of lovely birthday-related posts.  Including some fab cards, which I am totally going to be lifting sometime soon!!

So, it goes without saying that the things I am most proud of making are my children.  But after them, come a whole slew of beautiful and meaningful results of hard labour.  And today, I want to show you a project I finished months ago but that still brings me a little bit of happy every time I see it.

When we moved into our house, it was on the understanding that we were going to change pretty much everything about it.  We did an emergency, stop-gap bedroom makeover before we even moved our stuff in and the bathroom had a superficial facelift (ugh, carpet and wallpaper?!) but the biggest need was in the kitchen/diner.  It's a beautiful space, completely ruined by orange wallpaper, cabinets that were falling to pieces and a lop-sided sink.  In summer 2009, we pulled down a wall (only a little one), replaced the ceiling, re-tiled the floor, repainted the walls and fitted a beautiful new kitchen.  We added some custom cupboard innards and some display shelving.  Fast-forward to early autumn 2011 and we had gorgeous green glass splashbacks fitted.  And the only thing left to do is the windows.

(Forgive the random photo of hubby making pancakes, it shows of my lovely kitchen and the lack of window treatment perfectly!)

We found the perfect fabric while wandering through IKEa, literally, it was hanging next to the stairs.  This was ages ago, before the splashbacks were even conceived so the colour of the glass was actually pulled from the curtains.

And in February 2011, I made a pair of curtains to go across the patio doors.  Well, made might be overstating it slightly.  We'd bought a pair of 3m long curtains so I had plenty of material to work with.  I bought header tape and some plastic snap-rings online to change them to eyelet-topped curtains.  And I made a lovely wide hem, joining the linings at the top and the bottom, to avoid small people and small cats playing between them!! 

And I love these curtains!  It took most of a weekend, and an unintended victim of my labours was my HTC phone.  But it was so worth it (and the premature arrival of my iPhone wasn't bad either!).  All I have left to do now is turn the other pair of curtains into a Roman blind.  I have the fixings, I just need the time, but I'm determined to have it done before I go back to work!