I have lots of excuses for why it's taking me so long to make three piddly little curtains. Really I do.

The pattern is simple but it takes forever to sew. And cutting fabric by the yard requires me to crawl around on the floor, pinning the stuff to my handy little cardboard sewing pad so I can cut 2 yard into thirds as evenly as possible. Oh, and sheer material has a real lovely tendency to snag.

The pattern requires lots and lots and lots of pressing (did I mention 'lots'?) and I have no idea where my iron is, so I had to borrow one from my mom. Every other instruction for these things involves the word 'press'. I swear I'm not kidding. I have pressed more hems and seams in the past week then I really want to repeat any time soon (so I suppose I just shouldn't think about the fact that next on the list are the two curtains for the computer room, and then the four for the living room. Whimper).

It took me longer to get the iron because the shower door was broken.

No, really, there is a connection. Honest there is. See, over the last few months, little tiny screws have been working their way loose from the shower door, to the point where the door was hanging a bit odd, and I finally gathered them all up and tried to put them back in, but they'd all been stripped. So I called the builder we used, who pointed me toward the shower door company, who came out, determined that yes indeedy it was broken, and left with our shower door in tow, promising to return it later. Because I had to wait for them to come back (and they gave me that vague 'we'll drop it off sometime today' thing delivery people like to do), I couldn't leave to go get the iron, so that killed a day or two too.

The main reason why it's taken me so long, however, is that it's been Too Darn Hot.

In order to do this undisturbed, I've been working in the guest room / sewing room, occasionally opening the door to pat Azzie on the head when his cries of 'you're behind that door and I can get to you!' become too frantic, but otherwise shuffling fabric and pattern pieces around blissfully unencumbered by feline assistance. The problem is that with the doors to that room closed, even with the air conditioning on and keeping the rest of the house lovely and cool, that room has a tendency to get unbearably stuffy by early afternoon. And it doesn't help that I've got bright lights and a hot iron to add to the mix.

But despite all these excuses and setbacks, I'm nearly done, and today we proudly hung our very first curtain in the master bedroom. This involved a trip to the fabric store to purchase a curtain rod, comments about one of us having to hold the other's nuts (as in nuts and BOLTS, people. Ahem), copious amounts of snickering about the previous comment, and of course me standing back a few feet to do the 'up just a smidge. No. In a little. Up. Down. In. Okay!' thing to Richard, who was stuck holding the curtain rod at an awkward angle over his head.

It looks lovely. I'm realizing that my 'oops' of making it about a foot wider than I'd originally planned was actually a good thing, and for any future curtains I'll probably add a few more inches to the length, but this one turned out rather well.

I'm just oozing domestic pride all over the place right about now. Today curtains, tomorrow, the....uh...well...hmm. I'll figure that out later. After I finish curtains number two and three.