I hate to block out the sun, but . . .

We finally moved the furniture around in the childrens' rooms this weekend, so Astrid is in her own room at last! She's sleeping pretty well in the cot, but she's definitely a babe who's aware of when it's light - a trip to Dunelm Mill to buy blackout fabric was needed. As it worked out nearly the same price, in the end I actually bought these blackout curtains - they're designed to be slotted onto the same curtain pole as a pair of eyelet curtains, and they actually work really well.

Image from here.

Hopefully I'll post a picture of Astrid's curtains tomorrow - I didn't get a chance to take one earlier and REALLY don't want to disturb her now. I've swapped the blue curtains that were in the room already (because the room belonged to Torin), for one of the pairs of curtains that we had in our room - the plan is that we'll soon be getting blinds in our bedroom.

At the moment poor Torin is making do with a blanket tied over his window as a makeshift curtain. This is actually one of the reasons we hadn't moved the children around sooner - Torin's bed was going to go underneath the window in his new bedroom and hanging over the window (and therefore within his reach) was a rather useless see-through woven roller blind with a long cord attached to it. I really didn't feel comfortable with Torin being able to reach the cord, so was really hesitant to put him in the room until we had something else to put up at the window. 

I initially thought of cutting down the curtains that were in his current room to try and avoid spending more money, but the window is quite wide and short (the recess is 120x88cm) and I thought curtains wouldn't look quite right in the room. I wanted the clean lines of a blind, but without the danger of a long cord, so I investigated spring-loaded roller blinds. After a bit of internet-trawling, I finally settled on a blackout, spring-loaded roller blind from Keeley's Blinds. They seemed pretty reasonable and say they'll deliver my made-to-measure blind within a week. Colourwise, I decided to go for a cream as I still haven't decided on what colour I want to paint Torin's room and so I needed something that would go with any colour scheme and also a colour that he wouldn't outgrow.

Image from here.

What do you think - boring or practical?