First of all, before we get back into any of this DIY stuff, thank you so much for all the well wishes and lovely comments on my last post about our new baby Jack. He’s doing great, very strong and healthy, although he’s keeping me up all night every night feeding. I don’t think I’ve slept more than 2 hours for the last five nights! It’s all worth it though to have a healthy, thriving baby. What a relief! In fact, just yesterday we went to see the doctor and he’s already gained 2 oz over his birth weight! Babies lose weight after birth and you usually want them back up to birth weight by 2 weeks old, so his weight gain is a big deal!
OK, enough baby talk for today. 🙂 Onto the DIY of the day. Of course it’s still Jack-related!
Today we’re going to talk curtains. DIY curtains to be exact. Now, don’t go getting all scared about this. I hear you! Some of the curtain creations people come up with out there are really spectacular. And beautiful. And complicated. And so not for you right now. I’m right there with you.
I’ve really been enjoying all the little sewing projects I’ve been doing lately and one day, I know I’ll definitely follow one of those tutorials for “professional” looking curtains with pleats and dips and doo-dads and it will be great and not as hard as I think it’s going to be. Right now though, I want simple, fast, and straightforward. But I still want to maybe get my feet wet a little bit with this and try out this curtain making thing and come out the other side with awesome results.
If you’re right there with me, then this tutorial is for you!
If you’re looking for an even easier way to make your own curtains, I’ve got you covered for that too. It’s a little easier, but honestly, not by much.
So, it goes like this:
I needed curtains for the nursery and I had big plans for taking some plain white curtains and painting big stripes on them. It was going to be awesome. But then, as I got further along with this pregnancy, I remembered that bending over wasn’t really the easiest thing to do, but sitting at my sewing machine was still pretty comfortable and easy to do at the point a few weeks ago when I made these.
I was so lucky to have my friends at Online Fabric Store provide me with even more fabric for the room. The one I chose is called Covington Navy Woven Ticking. I think it has a really great vintagey baseball feel when it’s put in the room with everything else.
Of course, that’s a lot of fabric, so I still needed to get a little bit of help getting it all measured and cut, because that required bending over. 🙂
Measuring it was simple. We measured from the curtain rod down to the floor and added 4 inches. 1 inch for the hem at the bottom, and 3 inches for the curtain rod pocket at the top. For the width, we just left it as-is and it was perfect. More than perfect!
Then we cut!
This room only has one window, so I made 2 panels.
For each panel, I folded the sides in about a 1/2 an inch and ironed it, then sewed it in place.
I folded the bottoms of the panels in 1″ and ironed, then the tops got folded in 3″ and ironed. Both the bottom hem and the top were sewn in place as well.
And guess what? Done!
You really can get a lot fancier with your hems if you want to get a more finished edge. You can fold them in twice to hide the fraying fabric pretty easily and iron then sew that. The thing is though, you really don’t have to, and today is all about making this as simple and do-able as possible. The real key is picking a really beautiful fabric that you love, and whether you go fancy with your sewing or extremely basic, you will absolutely love the end result!
Measuring your own fabric is great because you can control exactly how they fall and get them to just slightly pool or graze the floor, depending on your mood.
I love this fabric next to our new floors and those big fat baseboards. Melts my heart every time!
They look so nice and crisp next to the beadboard ceiling too.
The DIY baseball finials that Chris made don’t hurt either!
Perfection!
If you’ve never tried making your own curtains, grab some beautiful fabric and give it a try! It doesn’t have to be complicated and I promise you’ll love it!
Thanks so much again to Online Fabric Store for providing me with the fabric for this project. I’m absolutely thrilled with how these curtains have helped to pull the room together!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.