I bet you guys keep thinking one of these days I’m going to fade away entirely, don’t you? But no, I keep coming back! Occasionally. Eventually maybe things will be less crazy around here and I’ll….nah, probably not anytime soon.

Right now we’re deep in the heart of college decision season for Ari. He applied to ONE MILLION schools (alright. sixteen. That’s still a lot), and he’s got some great options already. But he’s also going through a streak of bad news at the moment (kind of inevitable, since he had a lot of big reaches on his list), so things are pretty glum around here right now. The end of March can’t come soon enough!

(It took me so long to write this post that the above paragraph needs to be amended. Ari got into Hamilton, one of his top choices, last night! Now he’s happy again! It’s a roller coaster!)

But we’re not so glum that we can’t hang curtains in the dining room.

So these curtains are pretty ordinary: they’re green velvet Sanela curtains from Ikea. But what if I told you that these curtains have been sitting around in my linen closet for over a year! Every since Superkea Sunday 2018! Now THAT would really be something special, wouldn’t it?!

No?

Okay, well, that’s what happened. And this year, for the first time in many years, we did NOT go to Ikea on Superbowl Sunday 🙁 . We had already pretty much decided not to, because the Superbowl was happening in Atlanta this year, and traffic and all that. And then we realized that Ikea was actually closing early for the Superbowl, so it’s good we didn’t drive all the way down there.

So anyway, I present to you, in place of Superkea Sunday, Superkea CURTAINS!

I’ve been meaning to get curtains up in this room for, oh….coming up on seven years now. But the important thing is that I did it!

And to make this post a little more worthy of existing, we did something to the curtains that could very generously be described as a hack. Okay, that’s not really why. It’s partially because Ikea curtains are too long for our 8 foot ceilings, and I didn’t want to have to hem them, and partially because I really wanted more of those pretty brass rods from Target like we hung the bison tapestry on:

The curtains have silver metal rings along the top to insert the curtain rod through. I don’t mind curtains like that at all, but it wouldn’t look pretty enough with my brass rods AND I’d still have the too long curtains issue.

So we bought more of the same rings we used to hang the bison, folded over the top of the curtains, and attached the rings to the back of the fold. As shown in this excellent iPhone photograph:

Finished product:

Now I’m wishing I’d messed with that panel on the far right more before I took the picture.

But anyway–making progress! And now we need to get Ikea again, because we have some gift cards and a coupon. But what should we buy?! I have no idea. But I suspect we can think of something.

Okay, so as I was thinking over this post, it occurs to me that messing with Ikea curtains is something I’ve posted about a couple of times before. So I present to you three other Ikea curtain hack ideas from blogs posts past:

There was that time I no-sew hemmed the (also too long) curtains in our library:

These are still in there, by the way, and the hem has stayed put through lots of time and washings.

Or the time we made a whole new ROOM out of Ikea curtains:

Or my favorite, Abe’s bison curtains (there are an awful lot of bisons in this house, I’m realizing now):