Here’s the new curtain I made the cover the baptismal font at the front of our church. (Yes, Crossroads is a PCA church. Think about it.)
Anyway, since we needed to cover up the evidence of a baptismal font for obvious reasons, I found myself making my first ever set of curtains! It was quite the ordeal. First I had to pick out brown fabric (we’re ultra-trendy at Crossroads), then I had to go to two different Hobby Lobbys in the pouring rain to get 13 yards of the dratted stuff. Then Derek and I tried to find directions for making triple pinch pleated drapes online since the library books I’d gotten were marginally helpful. (Public service announcement: anything you click that says “triple pinch pleated drapes” online will send you to this dumb website put up by a woman who wants to sell you her video for just $19.95 that takes you step by step through the process. Youtube searches yield the same woman standing in her kitchen speaking into a camcorder with a promise that if you buy her video, you’ll learn all the secrets to making perfect triple pinch pleated drapes.)
I thought I’d figured it out until we got to church to put them up and realized that the old curtains were not triple pinch pleated drapes! They just had tucks and grommets. (If this sounds like Greek, it did to me, too, until this week!) So we scrambled down to a drapery store in downtown Maplewood where the generous shopowner donated the right hooks to make my curtains work with the old track. (Apparently her mother used to be the secretary for the adult dunking church that owned the building before our infant sprinkling congregation bought it.) 
Armed with the correct equipment, we found to our dismay that I had sewn the heading tape in upside down since I didn’t know what it was for. Derek had to race back home and bring my sewing machine and the extra heading tape (or buckram, as the drapery lady called it), at which point we pulled the communion table up on the platform and I sewed as fast as I could. It did strike me that I probably resembled a character in a Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene story, desecrating the communion table with a common sewing machine. This time I got it all right, and with the help of the Reeves (who had come to let us into the church two and a half hours earlier and kindly stayed and helped through the whole ordeal), we got the curtain up in time for its debut today! Everyone’s kind compliments made me feel that it was all worth it.
And here’s Tommy getting ready for church. We didn’t let him wear the baseball cap…thought it didn’t go with the suit!