Two less than pretty projects!

We moved in to our new house in June and still need to finish decorating our bedroom. Reminding ourselves of the beached whale I became towards the end of my first pregnancy (and the fact that I was constantly pushing J. out of bed), we decided to upgrade to a King Sized bed. Aaaaah, lush - lots of space and soft sheets but aaaaarrrgh, wait a minute! No duvet cover to fit the new sized duvet!!

Having spent such a lot of my childhood with my Grandma and listening to her tales of living from rations during the 40s, I like to think of myself as being a bit thrifty when I need to be. Our old bedroom and (so far half of) the new one, is decorated  in a Moroccan style so I didn't want to throw away the old Moroccan style duvet cover (which was hard to find anyway) and begin the ardous seach again. So I had a brain wave! (Or at least I thought I had!)

I took an old, dark purple sheet (similar to the colour on our bedroom walls) and decided to extend the cover to fit the duvet. I completely under-estimated the weight of such a beast being forced through my sewing machine though and the what seemed like hours of pinning it all! Over-whelmed by the sheer size of it, and the fact that I wanted to get it finished during T.'s nap time, I lazily extended the length and only one side of the width.

The result is quite sloppy, but it does do the job:

Our old bedroom had these fabulous curtains:

But with an attic bedroom now, I decided to thrift this pair of curtains to fit the two new windows (opposite each other). Here's one of the windows:

Again, I felt like the curtains had a sloppy look to them, so I added a tie, which didn't seem to help :-(

Oh well, I have been thrifty and I have proven a point to myself - I don't enjoy functional, practical sewing, I just like to create pretty things, and there's nothing wrong with that!