Puddling my curtains

The new chic thing for upscale homes is ‘curtains that puddle’. This means that the curtain length is deliberately long, and the bottom portion of the fabric puddles on the floor. It is supposed to evoke the feeling of a long wedding train, and therefore is romantic.

I hate it.

I am not a fan of curtains anyway, and yes, I’ve been blessed with not having to have any in most of the places I’ve lived. Either my property lot has been large, or set back from the road, or there have been no neighbors. I don’t like feeling hemmed in. I love light and I love the breeze at night.

But recently neighbors moved in right next door and I bought some curtains. (I do not live in a drapery kind of home.) I like symmetry. I like order. I like clean lines. The curtains I’d bought were simple and neutral colored. The TV design show hosts would balk at my design scheme, no doubt. I’d be on the show for “Color Intervention” or “Design Faux Pas” if they had shows like that. But I live in a two room apartment and excess fabric weighs down the room and too much color distracts. I like it the way I like it.

One set of the curtains I bought fell to the floor exactly. I had not measured prior to going to the store, thinking that the curtains at the thrift store were so inexpensive I would not mind simply cutting them if I needed to, but likely I would not because the windows are standard.

On the window at the front door, I put up a long curtain that has big pleats. It falls to the floor perfectly. However, I discovered that I obsess over making sure the pleats are equidistant from one another and perfectly in alignment. At one point I thought about getting a measuring tape to make sure the pleats are separated evenly but I had seen an episode of Law & Order last year where the wife had measured each shirt in the closet to make sure they were exactly separated from one another and one day she just snapped and shot her husband, so I left the measuring tape in the drawer and now I just eyeball the pleats.

The bedroom curtain, though, is satin and a little fancier, coming to a Vee with a tassel. It is long. It puddles. All that means is, it lays on the floor and gets in the way. When I open and close the curtain, it drags the dust from the floor (if there is any, ha ha).

I think puddling curtains are not romantic. They are simply impractical, messy, and unsymmetrical. And in my world, symmetry is everything.