Getting the right layout for my living room was no easy endeavor. Getting a new couch and then figuring out where to put it, arranging the artwork along the walls, figuring out what types of chairs would look tasteful, but not clutter the room too much or where to place my sony console for me to be comfortable in playing. All of these proved to be incredible headaches. But the worst of all was picking out material for curtains.

I don't know what it is, but I just couldn't find the right material for curtains. I had these beautiful cast iron curtain rods, and it had been my plan to just head down to the store and get going. But I was just overwhelmed by the sheer variety of fabrics. A million different colors and textures, not to mention the varied and outlandish patterns displayed. They all swarmed at me, and soon my quest to find material for curtains had gone from routine to hopeless. My living room would go, for the moment, without window coverings. 

Then my best girlfriend Betty came over for mid afternoon drinks, and we had a chance to talk it out. She suggested that I didn't need to just settle on one material for curtains. I was intrigued, and asked her what she meant. She smiled and pointed to her handbag which, rudely, I had somehow failed to notice as she walked in. I looked at it, and was positively dazzled. It was sewn out of dozen of pieces of fabric in all sorts of different colors, in a brilliant, but ragbag configuration. She said she had faced a similar problem to my own, being unable to find the perfect material to make her new handbag from. So she had taken scraps of all of her favorite fabrics from other projects, and made it from that. If I wanted to take that approach, I certainly had enough material for curtains lying around as we spoke. 

She was right. That afternoon, we gathered and arranged all of the material for curtains until we had it lain out neatly together. Sewing it was another matter, however. To make perfect, neat rectangles out of hundreds of scraps is next to impossible. So we went out and bought some neutral material for curtains from the clothing store to use as a backing, which would show to the street. Then we sewed the scraps on to it. The whole thing took about six hours, but when we were done, I had beautiful, quirky curtains.