In last autumn’s issue of World Sweet World mag we published the great project by Christine Reitze (check it out here) showing you how to make snuggly winter curtains out of blankets. We have the beauties from that project hanging in our bedroom already, but with winter looming again I figured I needed to kit out the rest of the house. The only problem is that, living in a villa with super-tall windows, I’ve been struggling to find blankets that will be long or wide enough to do the trick.

On a recent trip to the fabric shop I stumbled across the perfect solution: Lining tape. Now this may sound kind of obvious, but using blankets as lining instead of the main act means that it doesn’t matter if they don’t reach the ground, and they don’t have to be as wide, because the lining doesn’t need to be gathered. Bingo!

Because our windows are so big, I opted for a cheap ($5m), medium-weight fabric, knowing that with the blankets they’d still feel nice and heavy. I made some simple curtains (check out the previous post if you don’t know how to do that), sewed lining tape to the top of a blanket, and then hung the blanket to the back of my curtains with hooks. I now have full-length, totally insulated curtains that look heavy and drape well, and they only cost me around $60, including the blankets, tape and hooks.

I’m stoked with how much difference they make to the room, and our landlord is getting a grant to install insulation and a heatpump through the EECA energywise scheme , but we’re still keen to do further winter-proofing before we have a tiny child in the house.

Any ideas? What are you doing to keep your diggs toasty this winter?

Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 10:33 am. Filed under Projects & ideas. Follow comments (RSS 2.0), comment, or trackback.