I was making a set of blinds for my dining room and needed a white backing fabric. The sheets worked perfectly, or half of one sheet worked perfectly. The blinds were super easy to make. I just cut the inner and outer fabric pieces to size, sewed them together, sewed two ribbon ties for each blind and sewed a pocked for the tension rod. I found the tension rods at the Thrift Center for $1.99 each. Not bad considering they are $6 brand new. The black and white fabric was given to me by my very generous mother-in-law. In the future I plan on using sheets for the decorative fabric as well.
The total cost of these blinds was about $5 altogether!
There is no fancy dancy system to lower and raise these blinds. I simply roll them up to the desired length and tie them up with the ribbon. It works just fine.
One up, one down :)
Both up, the usual position.
The color scheme for my dining room was to be black and white that way the accent colors could be changed with the seasons. I had the blinds made so the next order of business was a rug. Well my dining table is a small, round, black table with four black chairs. I decided that a round rug would be really cute in the small space, so I started pricing rugs. YIKES!!! Rugs are expensive.
I researched the web for easy rug ideas and found a tremendous amount of information and inspiration. I decided to make a braided rug out of the remaining sheets using this tutorial from craftpassion.com. Check it out if your interested. It is much more informative than this post :) I ripped the sheets into two and a half inch strip that ran the lenght of the sheet. Then I braided all the pieces together. I ended up with a small, heavy bundle of braided sheet.
The next step was to sew the braids into a circular rug. I started sewing the braids together by hand, but in the middle of a Florida summer that is a HOT job, so I used my machine for this and I doubt it will ever forgive me :) My shoulders were also very upset. The bigger the rug gets the heavier and more cumbersome it becomes.
I broke the sewing up by doing just a little bit each day.
The rug is not finished because it does not cover all the floor space under the table.
It has been a long process because I was hired for a very demanding teaching job while working on this project and it was put on the back burner for months. I hope to finish it this summer. I need at least two more sheets to finish the rug. In the end I will have spent maybe ten dollars on the whole project but a whole lot of time. This doesn't bother me because I am more than happy to have more time than money :)
Other helpful rug making sites: http://www.modabakeshop.com/2009/02/braided-rag-rug.html
