what has 4 folds and won't fit in an envelope?

if you said, "that sounds like many of your larger cards, lauren!" of course you're quite right, but that's not what i meant. in this case, the answer is the room divider i just finished macguyvering to hide the exercise equipment which resides in our guest bedroom:

i was hoping to find one item, pay for it, and be done. but that never happens, does it? at least, it never seems to happen to me, lol. i saw lots of folding screen/room dividers, both online and in stores, but none of them were quite right. finally i found a pretty three-paneled one at home goods, which was everything i wanted, except opaque; but i had A PLAN for that.

as it turned out, it was also only about half the size we needed, so i after a lot of calling around to track down a second one, i got to work on THE PLAN, which was to back the panels with some pretty but neutral fabric.

i ironed, trimmed, ironed, hemmed, and ironed a piece of fabric to fit quite precisely behind one of the panels, and lovely husband jeff tacked it into place with his heavy-duty staple gun.

then i went back and did all of that five more times. :)

do you like the paisleys? i love them. they're a ralph lauren fabric... ok technically... they are a set of ralph lauren sheets, found on sale, at home goods:

i am certainly not the world's best seamstress, as you can see from the back of the panels. (the really professional-looking top edge is the actually-professional hem of the sheets; i also used their two side seams; this gave us one set of nice straight lines to work with and helped make the orientation of the pattern consistent.)

on the other hand, since these are only going to be used to keep our overnight guests from feeling as if they're sleeping at the gym, i think my "measure, cut, sew" method is adequate; and since we kept the panels nice and flat, the screens can still be folded up...

...but at the moment i'm kind of enjoying gazing upon my handy-work, so i've got them in the corner of the room. if you're planning an overnight trip to central new jersey darlings, let me know; we could really use some guest room testers!!! ♥♥♥