Ruffles and Bubbles!

Hey! I hope you all had a great week! I know I am loving that it is Saturday!

This week I finished up a class for the summer. Goodbye Nursing Ethics, I will not pine after you! It is good to have it out of the way and one step closer to Master's degree, but I sure will not miss it. One more year ladies and gentlemen and I will be doneskies with schoolio...no biggie really I have only been in for the last 18 years ;)

Speaking of school, I thought I would try my hand at teaching you all something that I did for my bathroom. Let me know how you like it. Now you have to bear with me, I have never done a tutorial or a before and after reveal, so I am taking on a lot here. Be gentle with your judgement!



With that let's get rolling!

First the Before shot...this is a curtain I picked up at Wal-Mart one day for 8 bucks and thought...ehh that could do and it could not. I was never satisfied with it and in hindsight it was a total impulse buy without regard to the actual design...fail. I hate it when I do this. Oh and you may think that this curtain was never washed or ironed and you would be wrong. These wrinkles are resilient and horrendously irritating...





This is the after...



So what I did to the room and then I will give you a tutorial on how I did the shower curtain.
I painted the walls artic blue by Glidden in semi gloss. I also had to paint the ceiling because we were having some mildew issues (YUCK!!!). So I Kilz'ed that.

The box is one of my finds from the swap meet that I talked about here. It was $20, which is a little steep, but my amazing mama bought it for me for my birthday!


The mirror actually is nothing new to our home. I found it when T and I first got married at a garage sale for 2 bucks! It was a splurge when we first got married as we had NO money. It was a standing dressing mirror. When we moved down to Oklahoma the stand didn't fair well and then it was just a mirror...I had it sitting around the house despite T's asking me over and over again if we could take it to the Goodwill...I am sentimentally attached to it.




It was originally a dark cherry, but this bathroom is so small I thought it needed lighter colors to make it feel bigger. So I painted it antique white and then antique glazed it.



The little stool is perfect for when I soak in the tub, it is great for a drink or magazine to rest while you get situated :) It was one of our finds when we cleaned out those storage sheds.




So that's that with my before and after. We really love the change and the room does feel bigger despite the fact that it is so so small and our only bathroom in our house.

With that, let the tutorial begin!

I began by purchasing a shower curtain liner from Target just like this one...


I washed the shower curtain and dried it, no ironing required on this bad boy it didn't need it! Wrinkle FREE!


For the ruffles, I scored and found some old fabric in an off-white at the thrift store. SCORE!!! I cut the fabric into 3 inch strips and it look like a big pile of this...


Then I began making all those strips into ruffles...this may look daunting, but it isn't hard just time consuming. To make it easy on your sewing machine, set your tension high and your stitch length long and the work will be done for you. If your machine is not cooperating with you on this, you can make a modified ruffle by going slow on your machine and crumpling the fabric as it goes under the presser foot. (Not quite the same look but it is pretty darn close!)




When this is done you should have a big long strip of ruffle that looks like this...



Choose how many rows of ruffles you would like on the curtain. I chose 5 because that is all the ruffle that my thrift store fabric would make me, but I really like just the 5 rows to so it worked out for me. Then let the pinning begin...




Pin the ruffles to the curtain starting at the top of the curtain where the hooks go in making sure not to sew over them (you will end up making it so that you can't use the hook hole if you do this). Now this is where I learned a lesson in the project, only pin one row at a time. I thought I would save myself some time by doing them all at once...fail. It just made it hard to sew and I kept poking myself while sewing on the other rows of ruffles. Nothing major, just really annoying.

So you have pinned your first row, now you will sew right over where you made your ruffle stitch, in the same color you did your ruffle stitch so that the stitch will blend in.

Repeat these last two steps for as many rows as you want on your curtain. Then hang and enjoy!

Total cost of room?
Paint in Artic Blue by Glidden...$5 (It was a paint return at Home Depot)
Shower Curtain...$10
Thrift Store Fabric...$0.50 (It was half-off day at the thrift store)
Crate Box on Wall...$20 (Gift from my mama) so that make it $0
Stool...Free (Thank you Grandma McCord and Family!)
Mirror...Already had so we will call it free too!
Towels...Already had so we will call those free too!

Total cost...$15.50 with out the Crate, or $35.50 with it...either way a steal of a deal!

Oh and credit must be given to my stellar helper, Haywood. Thank you sir for laying on the curtain during the pinning process and pretending that the ruffles were squirrels. It helped so very much!