CALICO CURTAINS

Southland Times, Issue 23791, 13 April 1939, Page 14

CALICO CURTAINS

A WOMAN with imagination can often plan fascinating furnishing novelties, at a very small cost from apparently unpromising materials. The first set is made of unbleached calico, at sixpence-three-farthings the yard. The curtains are trimmed with rings and circles of Chinese red felt, sewn in haphazard way with matching cotton. To prepare the decorations, cut a cardboard circle about four inches across: Describe a circle with a radius of two inches, and then, still keeping the same centre, describe an inner circle with a radius of one and a-half inches. Cut round the outer and inner edges, and you will have a ring measuring four inches across, and half an inch wide. Place it on the felt, mark the outside and inside with chalk and cut out the inner round, which will form one of the solid circles to decorate the curtains. Finally cut round the other edge to get on> of the rings. The curtains should be hung from a narrow wooden pelmet board, enamelled Chinese red. The second pair of curtains cut from cornflower blue hessian is decorated with zig-zag borders of cream candle-wick tufting. First draw the outlines to be tufted, using red chalk and a ruler, and then work running stitches along the lines with a chenille needle threaded with double thickness candle-wick cotton. When all the lines are stitched, cut through the loops making little tufts. Keep the stitches quite close together and the tufts will fluff up into a continuous line.