Week two: curtain's (not quite) up!

I admit it; I'm obsessed with curtains. Perhaps it is a natural extension of my fabric obsession or perhaps the conditioning of repeatedly living in draughty houses but one way or the other, curtains are high on my list of 'useful things'. If I'm honest, curtain fabric (either in curtain form or off cuts of) makes up a reasonably significant part of the fabric stash. When I've paid £25+ a metre for fabric, I'm loathe to bin it. When we moved here a year ago I brought all of the curtains from our last house with me. In fact one blind actually belonged to my neighbour, I intercepted it before it went in the bin.  The collection also includes the very first pair I made myself and had originally been floor to ceiling in my son's room. Then I cut them short at the last house. When we came here I discovered I'd left sufficient hem to be able to make them long enough for their latest incarnation. 

This house has an 'interesting' layout. Between what was the back of the house (though in fact it's the bit near the road so I suppose you'd call it the front) and the old outside loo and wash house is a passage. The previous owners had used corrugated plastic to form a roof but it was absolutely freezing in winter. We've put a proper, insulated (!) roof on but the doors at either end of the passage are still pretty rickety. Not least because they are essentially gates

You can see the centimetre gap at the bottom! The other end is similar. 

The answer - a curtain and a draught excluder!

As it goes, I actually already had the curtain fabric - originally purchased a couple of years ago because it was on sale as the end of the roll and it matched the blinds in the kitchen. So the first part of this week's make was to make the curtain. I went for tab top, partly because I couldn't be bothered with the hooks and tape and partly because I've not actually made one before. The end result is pretty pleasing and will be even more so when I've got the curtain rail up! It currently looks like this 

An action shot will follow shortly.

The draught excluder is something of a work in progress at the moment - but a necessary one. I save all my scraps to stuff things like this and the basket is currently overflowing!