I got plenty of ideas by looking at ID magazines, especially In.Design. After more or less a couple of months long of looking at magazines, I have managed to come up with a few criteria to look for :
*** simple, preferably not floral design
*** quite thick material and a bit on the heavy side
*** the colour can blend into the setting of my living area
*** the design I'm going for is a very simple one, called the 'Ring' design that is just one layer, unlike the common do where we have the skirting, or 'kening', as my mom calls it.
*** must meet my budget of only RM1000
The next step would be to survey, survey and survey. Lucky me I live in Nilai. We have so many textile shops in Nilai Square and Nilai 3. For those who are not familiar with Nilai, Nilai 3 is a huge area that purportedly offers much lower than market prices for their products. Here you can find mostly shops selling textile, carpet, wedding preparation stuffs, furniture, clothes, toys, and the list goes on and on. Where as Nilai Square only mainly focuses on textile.
My first visit to a textile shop introduced me to a brandname called Elyza, you can check out the designs here. But as my research progressed further after that, I got to learn that Elyza curtains are way above my budget. So that prompted me to continue surveying first.
I went to all textile shops there are in both Nilai 3 and Nilai Square. Most of the shops have more or less the same (non-attractive, non-classy) designs until I found this shop :
This Tekstil Bunga Raya has so many amazing designs and I managed to capture some shots during my last visit there. My mom wanted the exact same design as mine, but in different colour hehe. Price-wise, it can really go further down, just that you have to do some bargaining. Mine was tagged at RM59 per meter, and I managed to get it for RM35 per meter (credit goes to my mom!). So to you out there who plans to get new curtains (for Raya perhaps), this shop is highly recommended!.
Notice the last pix has the date upside down? Because some of the designs have the bottom part printed differently, or bit special to make it the foot or 'kaki' of the curtain. But then, if we want to be a little creative, we can just turn them upside down and that different part can then be the skirting, or the kening of our curtain, hence the one-layer-only look. I did exactly that to mine.
And lastly, this is how mine looks like *wink* :
