The things we do for our feline overlords.

     Bessie and I have been having a disagreement. Namely, she thinks it's fun to get all up in these boxes on the bottom shelf of my bookcase and nose around, pawing at them and picking them up and dropping them (with her FACE) so they make an unholy racket at ridiculous hours of the early morning. I disagree. I don't find that fun at all.

     I couldn't just put the boxes somewhere else because they were keeping all those cords back there out of Bessie's reach. Originally I had books and dvds there, but I replaced them with boxes when she started chewing on them, figuring I'd rather have her chew up the corners of a few storage boxes than chew on wires and either electrocute herself or start a house fire (she hasn't chewed on the boxes after all, but as I said, the face-bulldozing is quite noisy). So I had to get creative. Here's what I ended up doing:

     1. First I grabbed some fabric that matches my room nicely, namely a blue and white striped seersucker fabric that my grandma had given my mom out of her stash. Then I got to measuring. I measured the inside width and height of the dresser, because I planned to hold the fabric in place with tension rods at the top and bottom of the second and third shelves. I added two inches to the height measurement to allow for the rod pockets, and decided to just use the width of the fabric for the width of the curtain, because I wanted it to be gathered.

     2. Then I cut it to the appropriate size...
 

     3. Then I ironed in a seam allowance on each of the vertical edges, as well as folding the top and bottom edges in 1/4 inch, then another inch, to create the rod pockets. 

     4. Next I sewed the vertical edges with the pockets (but not the 1/4 inch inside the pockets) unfolded.

     5. Finally, the rod pockets got sewn shut horizontally along the top and bottom edges.

     Then it was just a matter of slipping the tension rods in and putting the whole shebang into place!

    If you're super observant you might be able to tell from the clock in the before and after pictures that this whole thing took almost exactly an hour, and really only that long because I dilly-dallied a lot. Hopefully it will solve the Bessie-the-Destructor problem and let me get some sleep!