Curtains Dyed for Our Music/Dining Room!

Yahoo! I’ve finally dyed the new linen curtains I made for my music/dining room!

Most of the year, my dining room table lives pushed up against the window so the center is open for Hubby and Liam to practice trombone. Years ago, this window looked like this:

I soon ditched the sheers, since this window looks out onto our fenced backyard, so there’s nobody to see in at night time! Every Thanksgiving the trombones get put away and we host a huge feast:

It’s on days like this that I really notice how faded that valence is plus I really wish I had long curtain panels there. I first thought that I couldn’t have that because of the table being pushed against the wall, but then I realized that pulling it away from the wall a few inches would allow me to have long panels! So, I pre-washed two long pieces of linen and then made two panels to just the right height:

and then I waited for color inspiration to strike! Inspiration, plus the impending festivities we’ll be hosting at the house for the International Trombone Festival next week and Pokorny Festival the week after, happily struck a couple of weeks ago, and I dyed the panels in the backyard like this about a week ago:

That muddy color on the left is really a luscious earthy gold – this is an example of “trust in the process”, because the mixed dye doesn’t match the finished fabric, but trust I did, and I was rewarded with these:

Note: These photos are just iPhone pix, and I really had to blow out the picture in order to combat all the light coming in the window. Without the overexposing, the room looked like this, LOL:

We spent a few minutes hanging lots of art in the room, here’s a couple pix before the room was put back into use:

But normally, there are cases and mute bags on the table, so I just ran downstairs and snapped a couple more pictures that illustrate how it normally looks:

I sighed a big sigh of relief when this was done…We’ve been living with bare walls in there for a couple of months, and not only does it look naked to me that way, having quilts on the walls also dampens the echoing of the trombones a bit 😉