enter the draft snake

We live in a beautiful old Montreal apartment. It has hardwood floors, plaster walls, original (yet painted over, of course and sadly) wood trim and a beautiful back balcony. It also has beautiful old original doors, which are completely lacking in weather stripping. And while our new place is about a million times better in the way of insulation than our old one, that beautiful old front door is an extremely DRAFTY beautiful old front door. And drafts are not so beautiful in the midst of a Montreal winter.


For the past few months, we've been dealing with this by stuffing an old towel along the bottom of it, which although effective, is definitely not very appealing to the eye. I've been meaning to remedy this situation for ages, and finally got around to it yesterday.




I found this beautiful vintage linen fabric a few summers ago, at an epic garage sale held by some set designers who had worked on a 70's themed show. They were selling LOADS of beautiful vintage stuff from the 50's, 60's and 70's, for practically nothing. I think I scored this fabric for a few bucks, along with a few car loads of other amazing things.

Montreal, sometimes it pays to get up before noon, let this be a lesson to you.

The fabric is in generally beautiful condition, but the edge of it was a bit worn and faded. What a perfect excuse to finally make some of it into something.


I'm pretty happy with the final result, and by taking the 10 minutes to finally sew the damn thing, I achieved three things this weekend:

1) no annoying bunched up towel,
2) I finally got over my fear of cutting into that beautiful fabric,
3) it's stuffed with recycled fabric scraps, because we've had pantry moths and rodent visitors in the past, so I'm paranoid about leaving a rice buffet by the front door. Yay recycling.


Go me. I think I'll eventually recover one of our chairs with some of the rest of that fabric this summer, but we'll see.

What did you do this weekend?