It's Curtains for the Birds!

I decided I needed a new way to display my birds, and I got the idea of attaching a white panel surrounded by a colorful border, and using that as a curtain for a pair of bare windows in my living room.

(Despite the fact that the windows are on the north side, they still get enough light that I could only photograph the curtain at night.)

The white center was easy -- I had some nice fabric left over from simple white curtains I made for my bedroom.  It wasn't wide enough to cover both windows, but that would be fixed with a border.  Rooting through my fabric stash I found a collection of half yard and fat quarter cuts of bright Guatemalan-inspired fabric, which would be perfect.  I chose for the first border a half-yard of a bargello-like print in a rainbow of colors, which yielded a three inch border.  That wasn't enough, so I added a second border of five inch squares and five by ten inch rectangles cut from an assortment of wovens shot through with contrasting threads.  Satisfied, I held it up to the windows, and it still wasn't wide enough.  I was running out of fabric, but I took the two black fat quarters, cut them up into two and a half inch strips and had enough to border the whole thing.  But now the height of the curtain was way too long, and interfered with the air conditioner -- too bad I didn't pay attention to that dimension when I was sewing.  Off came the black borders on the top and bottom, along with an inch of the second border.  I finished the curtain by lining it with a spare white bed sheet, and I was done.

I don't keep my birds up all year, so I think I will use the curtain as a display for other things, too.  Like all my brightly colored, handmade ornaments -- I've finally reached the point where I have too many to decorate a medium-size tree, and I no longer display extras on the mantle (having become thoroughly enamored of my Three Kings display).  Maybe I'll put my Day of the Dead doohickies there, too.