I loved watching movies with my grandma when I was a kid. Grandpa would watch his programs in the living room, and we would go to the bedroom and watch movies. Two of our favorites were The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. One of my favorite parts of TSOM was when Maria made play clothes for the children from her curtains. I have always wanted to make clothes from curtains...bizarre, I know.
Several years ago, we bought curtains from Ikea for the living room in our previous house. They were belt loop curtains, and I loved they way they looked. When we moved into our current house, I bought what I thought were the same curtains for several rooms (not all the same color). However, either the design had changed or they were different curtains. The new ones were tab top curtains, and I just did not like the look. I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to fold them back and sew the tabs down to the back side to turn them into belt loop curtains. Well, more than 6 years later, I still hadn't dealt with the curtains. We only had curtains in one room: the playroom (technically the formal living room). We recently shuffled some rooms around, and the playroom is now the library. Since the curtain rods were there, I couldn't leave them bare, and the playroom curtains just would not work. It was time to tackle the curtain project.
I decided that the belt loop conversion project was just too ambitious. I wanted a solution, and I wanted it now. I simply cut off the top of the curtains, folded the top down 3-4 inches, folded the edge under half an inch, and sewed a pole pocket. I still need to hem the bottoms (Ikea curtains are long!), but the situation is under control.
Then, Halloween approached. My 9-year-old decided she wanted to be a mummy. We didn't want to spend anything on costumes, so I had to find a way to make her mummy costume. The discarded curtain tops were khaki and made of a rough cotton that keeps making me forget it's not linen...lightbulb moment!
I ripped out the seams, and each curtain top gave me 2 long narrow strips of fabric plus 8 shorter, wider strips. I ripped the tab pieces in half, so I had 16 short narrow strips. I threw out all of the sewing rules and went to town. I originally tried to sew the fabric to existing garments by wrapping it around as I went. The small circumference of the sleeves (and even pant legs) was difficult to manage, and I kept pulling the fabric too tight around the pants, so they wouldn't fit when she tried them on.
I ended up just lapping pieces of fabric together in the shape of pants. First I did the legs, intending to insert the other pant legs into them and sew them to each other. When it was clear that the other pants just weren't going to work (they were outgrown anyway), I then lapped longer strips across the tops of the legs, leaving a space in between for the crotch area. When the rise was long enough, I folded the top down about half an inch and sewed a casing for elastic.
For the shirt, I had mostly managed the torso (almost up to the armpits) with my wrapping technique because I was using an old shirt of mine, so it was plenty big on her. I did sleeves separately using the same lapping technique I used for the pant legs. From there, I just plunked pieces of fabric onto the blank spots and sewed them on until just about everything was covered. The shirt I was using was navy blue, so I allowed a couple small blank spots to remain, so it would look like she had unwrapped a bit.
I thought the headpiece would be easy. Ha! I was going to safety pin fabric to a ski mask. Of course, that just didn't work. I ended up using the ski mask as a pattern for the eye and mouth hole placements and went to town just sewing pieces on until it resembled a hat.
In the end, she had her mummy costume, finished at approximately 4:15pm on Halloween. She was the only mummy we saw, and we got tons of comments and compliments on it. And it was made mostly from curtains. I have a couple more panels I could have taken tops from, but I was running short on time and just grabbed some matching linen scraps.
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