a hex on me!

We have a humongous window in our living room.  It's taken me the best part of a decade to persuade Graham that curtains would be nice there, only to find out we can't afford the material, let alone afford to have curtains made.*  Years ago (in the pre-Graham days) my mum had ingeniously made curtains for said massive window from dustsheets - a clever plan, but they did look a tad...dustsheety and too neutral for what we want to do with our living room nowadays, which is quite a '70s space, I guess.  Unfortunately, dustsheets were really all we could afford at the moment, so I went ahead and secretly bought some with a vague plan to dye or embroider or applique them into something we'd actively like.  After much browsing around on Pinterest (see this board) I think I've decided that simple hexagons are the way I want to go, that they need to be quite precise/geometric and that I will still be making the curtains from beyond the grave if I do them sashiko style, so instead I've been making little "anchor stitches" where the corners meet and weaving another thread through these to make hexagons that sit on the surface. 

Above is my small trial run, in a random colour on a scrap of wrinkled white fabric.  I do like how it looks (surprisingly hexagonal/geometric) but I'm not sure whether it will work out on the real deal.  This method does mean there are large "stitches" sitting on top of the fabric which could probably be yanked and pulled and caught on things.  While it's fairly unlikely there would be any major pulls (they're not in a heavy-traffic area and Dulcie is quite well behaved these days, cats are another matter...) it's one heck of a big job to undertake knowing it could all be undone in a jiffy.  I'm only planning to stitch the design on the bottom two-thirds of the curtains, I think, but that still amounts to...erm...144 square feet?!  (Can that really be right?!  I'm fairly certain it is...)  Is there some other idea I'm missing that would work better?  Should I just bite the bullet and do it in real, little stitches?  I guess if I did the anchor stitches individually, knotting each one at the back rather than having thread running between them behind the fabric, then any pull would be fairly easily sorted...  But will they just end up looking a bit tatty?  Gah, I don't know, I'm really just thinking aloud now.  But if anyone reading this has any suggestions, please let me know.  Have a look at my Pinterest board and you'll see the sort of effect I'm  after.  We want curtains!

*Having made proper lined curtains for Dulcie's only-slightly-bigger-than-average bedroom window, I know I am not up for pattern matching and fabric wrangling on this scale, and the fabric alone would be mega expensive, so the pressure would be on to do a perfect job.  Plus we can't agree on a fabric!  Ha!

fringe benefits...or the lunatic fringe?

I don't think I've posted any photos of myself for a long time (?) so here's one of me looking tired in a dirty mirror.  Hello!  Did I ever mention I got a fringe?  I asked a random hairdresser to fringe me back in December and I couldn't say I liked what she did, so I went home and cut it again myself immediately.  Very short, very weird-looking, but still better than the hairdresser's attempt, in my opinion anyway.  These days (since when I'm not sure) I have a very relaxed approach to hair, the it-will-grow-back-eventually mindset.  And that is what happened, but just as my own fringe WAS starting to grow back, I found myself in front of the bathroom mirror with teeny-tiny nail scissors in my hand and Dulcie beside me, saying, "Don't do it, Mum!"  But I did and my fringe was weird and super short and very wonky again because it's hard to cut in a straight line with tiny nail scissors.  But guess what? Just like before, my hair grew back!  Yay!  Personally, I think having a fringe is fun.  When they are bad (like in the rain or when in need of a wash) they are very, very bad, but when they are good they are awesome.  And whether looking good or bad, they are always a source of entertainment and something to fiddle with and wonder about.  ("Do I like it? I'm not sure. Maybe I like it?  But why?" etc)

I'm not one to consciously follow fashions, but I like spotting other members of the fringe brigade out and about and there are certainly a lot of us these days!  Last week I told Graham that my musical taste could be classified as "girls with fringes".  I was being flippant but I think it's probably true.  Here's a girl with a fringe I'm liking at the moment, both in terms of hair and music, but most especially for incredible whistling ability.