Chinese New Year 2018 falls on February 16, 2018.
As a curtain maker, I have been asked to make “ang chye” or red cloth. This is mainly a Chinese culture where house owners or business owners will usher in the Chinese New Year with a red cloth over the front door.
I have never ventured into making this type of curtain decoration because I do not know how to do it. But I have 2 customers who are new house owners and I am really pressed to get it done. In desperation, I asked my daughter if she had any idea how to do it. She looked at YouTube and after a while, she said it is like making the gathers for a woman’s skirt.
The width of the door is 45 inches and height is 100 inches. We cut the red cloth 12 feet long because it will cover half the door frame. Left and right side of the frame is 4 feet and centre is 4 feet making 12 feet in all.
The red cloth is first divided into 2 to get the centre. Then for the left side, we would take half of 45 inches and 22.5 inches on the right side. She stitched the centre. We didn’t know how long the drop should be and we went for 15 inches. For the left side, my daughter said to leave 6 inches allowance at the bottom. This would help the cloth to have a curve at the bottom. She repeated the allowance for the right side.
When we hung it up, it looked too big. After seeing how she did the gathers, I knew what to do. I unpicked the stitches and then stitched the drop to 7 inches. I repeated the same for the right and left sides. And after hanging it up, it looked fine!
This is how we calculated the dimensions based on the door frame.

Flower ribbons for the left, middle, and right side.
