Ah, the joys of shopping at Goodwill. One day back in April I came across five unopened packages of white queen size sheets. Each package had been dated – in old lady handwriting, no less! – starting in 1973 and ending in 1980. These poor sheets have been suffocating inside their plastic wrapping all those years. Don’t worry, 40-year-old virgin sheets. I’ll find a use for you!

Priced at just $4 each, I bought all five packages of sheets. I didn’t have a plan for them at the time but I knew I couldn’t pass them up. When would I stumble upon American-made bedding again? And for $4 no less!

The packaged sheets sat on my sewing table for a couple of months before I finally got the nerve to open them. It’s silly, but there was a part of me that hated to open them at all. I mean, the packaging is so cute, even with the old lady writing on it. Unlike an old lady, however, I’ve never been one to let things languish in a closet. If I’m going to buy five packages of sheets, I’m going to find a use for them dammit!

And so one day last week I finally ripped open the packages and found a use for the 40-year-old bedding. After washing and ironing the sheets, I turned them into curtains for the master bedroom. And it was so easy! You see, the sheets already had a top hem that was open on the ends – making them perfectly suited for sliding onto a curtain rod. The only thing I had to do was shorten them a little. It was more work ironing the laundered sheets than it was to hem them.

For the price, I couldn’t have even found fabric to cover these windows this cheaply – let alone fabric that had already been finished off like these sheets. For just $16 I was able to cover all the windows in the master bedroom. And I did it with American-made fabric from forty years ago. Gotta love that!

I might not be finished with the curtains just yet. I’m considering dip dying them to finish them off. At least, that was my original plan when I thought to turn the sheets into curtains. Now that they’re hanging, however, I quite like the fact that they’re pure white. Even when they’re closed, the white curtains keep the room feeling nice and bright.

I used four of the five packages of sheets to create the curtains. That leaves me one package to use on another project. I’m thinking shower curtain perhaps.

Images: This American House