Beyond the Souvenir Shop

First off Happy New Year! Can't believe we are already almost half way through January, my how time fly's.  My family took a much needed break right after Christmas.  We were fortunate to be able to take a road trip to San Francisco between Christmas and New Year's and have a little rest and relaxation.  We took in the sites, walked along the waterfront, went to fisherman's wharf, ate good seafood, and took a boat tour to see the sites from the water.  But one stop into a store gave us the inspiration for this post, and took us beyond the souvenir shop to bring a little bit of San Francisco home with us.

It inspired us to upgrade the kids bath even further than we had so far to create this shower curtain made to represent sails and the drift wood compliments the design.

Here's the picture that started it all.  We went into the Exploratorium right off of pier 15, and while going through the gift shop I saw this and knew right away the design I was going to make for our home.  

To make it all even more perfect was the ease with which all the materials for the project were found.  We started out with the fabric for the "sail" we wanted to create.  Within 10 min at our local fabric store we found this upholstery fabric in the remnant section, and it was just the amount we needed.  As you can see it was a little dirty and had tape on it which did leave a few marks on the fabric, but that only added to the shipwrecked sail we were making, and only $3.50/yard.

We start cutting the fabric which can be daunting without a pattern to go off of, all I had was a picture in my mind of the finished product.  Knew I wanted a triangle for the look of a sail, but other than that we made it up as we went along.  Used the longest straight-edge we had to make the triangle which is our driftwood we purchased for this project.

Sew the pieces together

then press and hem the fabric.

We have a good start, and now we continue piecing more of the fabric together to complete our "sail" shower curtain.

We then need to add the markings on the sail, using images of sails off the internet we came up with the design,

and chose numbers with meaning like birthdays and anniversary numbers etc.

We mark out the holes on our shower curtain from the plastic shower liner, 

and use grommets to create holes for the curtain to hang from.

Now we get to the fun part, the wood!!  I love barnwood, love, love, love it.  I got the idea to put wood from the ceiling to the shower curtain from my cousin's wife, who is super creative.  Thanks Amy for the idea!!  I wanted ours to look like driftwood to go with our water sail ocean theme in the kids' bathroom.  We went to a local supplier of barnwood, and looked for the lightest wood we could find.  Within minutes I had the two pieces I wanted picked out, again so coming together with ease!!

We needed to secure our wood above the shower curtain, so we found scrap wood in our barn, cut them to size, and secured them to the ceiling and walls using anchors and screws, then we painted our brackets the color of the walls and ceiling.

This wood is so beautiful and adds so much character to this bathroom!  

The next trip you take, go beyond the souvenir shop and create something beautiful for your home that will constantly have your reminiscing about your adventures and travels.