Here’s the dilemma of taking photos of your new curtains: it’s winter in Portland, so if you want to take an indoor photo with natural sunlight, you have to throw open all the curtains to let in what little sunshine is available. If you do that, you can’t really see what the curtains look like—and taking a photo of the sunlit window washes out the rest of the room, anyway. I guess that if you spent more than $150 on your digital camera, you might be able to work around that, but I am a cheapskate, so forgive me for the overhead light!

This is what the living room looked like (blurry pals not typically included):

lovely friends; boring curtains

Here are the new curtains!

curtains from kitchen

front window curtains

rumply couch and curtains

So what you might be saying now is, “Uh. Hey. Those don’t match.” No, no they don’t.

A little backstory: I have been lusting over Amy Butler’s Nigella line since it was introduced. The combination of the Neo-Romantic designs with the nature-inspired palette makes me swoon hardcore. When I was working on the idea boards for our home, the Nigella line heavily influenced my color choices for the living room right from the start:

living room idea board

But home decorating fabric is expensive—$10-18 a yard usually—and curtains and pillows use up a lot of fabric. To make four window panels for my almost-floor-to-ceiling windows, I’d need 10 yards of fabric. So even if I found a good deal, I’d be looking at $150 just for curtains. That may seem reasonable to some people, but I’m frugal. That number makes me cringe. Thus, I started searching Etsy and eBay regularly for discounts on fabric, and lucked out with some post-Christmas sales. The fabric for my curtains ended up being $55.

Sure: they don’t match. But that’s kind of more of our style, anyway. May I remind you what Matthew wanted to do in our living room?

Potato Champion cart

He wanted to paint big zig-zags on the wall, ala the Potato Champion cart. But, you know, sans lumberjack. I like to think that I got pretty close with the fabric for the curtains behind the couch:

Amy Butler Nigella: Ritzy Stripe Nickel

The beige curtains that were in the living room have been moved into Milo’s room, where they’re picking up a little bit of the beige in his quilt and serving the practical duty of keeping out the draft from the windows, since they’re much thicker than the summer-weight curtains that were in there.

At some point in the future, we’re going to hang double-curtain rods so that we can hang sheer privacy curtains behind these that let in light, but these are doing the trick for the winter weather.

Come over and have a cup of tea on the couch with me!