Window Mistreatments a la The Nesting Place

I found the most wonderfully delightful blog about 2 weeks ago, The Nesting Place. Seriously, she is adorable...and her house/decorating skills...just stop it!!!! Her “nest” is the most amazingly warm, stylish, welcoming and CUTE thing you have ever seen. Best of all is she does all of her decorating on a budget and not a big budget. I’m talking about a use what you have, TJ Maxx or thrifting type budget. You know, a REAL budget! Right up my alley.

What I absolutely loved about her blog were her window mistreatments. Yeah! I have been mistreating window treatments, well really any form of home decor sewing, since my first apartment in college. I taught myself to sew while in college, starting with garments and then moving on to window treatments, table skirts, pillows, chair pads...blah blah blah.

I figured out early on in my sewing that, with the exception of garments, patterns are just a frustrating unnecessary step. Certainly for 99% of home decor sewing I would much rather wing it than follow any annoying pattern. Shoddy construction does not offend me as long as the end “look” is what I imagined it would be!

Whenever a friend or family member has said “you could do that for me” in regards to something I have sewn for my house I always think...oh geez you have NO idea! I would never subject anyone else to my half ass methods of decorative sewing. I would be totally embarrassed if they saw the true workmanship!

I ordered a big cut of some fabric off of E-bay that I thought I wanted to make curtains in the dining room with. It turned out to not be what I wanted for the dining room. Hard to really tell about fabric online. Anyway it was nice decorator fabric, kind of a faded Ralph Lauren look. And good heavens it was about 15 yards and I think I paid $12.

Our master bathroom has this big glass block window over the tub. It gets really cold in there in the winter. I knew having curtains would help remedy the cold, so I added window treatments to my perpetual to-do list. I also thought that the bathroom was blah. It is a nice bathroom with great neutral paint, but it needed a serious spark.

Then I came across The Nester and her brilliant window mistreatments with the ring clips, and that along with my E-bay fabric gold mine, I was in business.

Here is the dull before of the bathroom......excuse the collection of boats and cars, yes the blonde rascal loves him some jacuzzi bath action! (Sorry none of these pictures are very good)

And after some window mistreating!

The nester is VERY handy with the glue gun in her window mistreatments, however sewing for me is just as easy as gluing. I just cut my fabric in half, and still even then had enough to fold each half, in half again. Lining without the effort!

Instead of some sort of tassel fringe, which can very expensive, I simply sewed some wire edged ribbon into the seam....$8.The top of each panel was the fold of the fabric, so I quickly sewed down both sides and then
added some brown damask at the bottom so they would "puddle."
The most expensive part of the whole endeavor were the rods. However these Christopher Lowell rods were 40% off at JoAnn's. So I got 2 rods for $40.

There was no measuring of anything, I don't like measuring...this method is forgiving because of the poof at the top and the puddle at the bottom. Just how I like it, a real no brainer! This would not however work with poor quality fabric, it would look cheap. I think it is also important to have massive yardages because the treatments being "full" helps to cover a multitude of sins!

Go! Go now and visit The Nesting Place! You will love it! She will inspire you...go fire up your glue gun girls!! Keep your eyes peeled for bargain quality fabric... then go forth and mistreat some windows!!!!