home improvement take….68438

Beginning many weeks (and maybe a few months) ago, I started buying fabric to make curtains for some of our rooms. I had high hopes of making curtains for our bedroom, bathroom and guest room. The fabric rolled in and I either didn’t have enough or the husband wasn’t a fan of the pattern I chose. Needless to say, I have eight yards of one fabric that I now have to find a use for.

But, this fabric by Amy Butler. This, I was in love with. I needed more to have a full set of curtains for the bathroom, but fabric.com was sold out. So I chose a different fabric. And I didn’t *love* it for that room. Two weeks ago, it was available, and I ordered it.

My friends and I were going to get together and sew today, but we canceled at the last minute. I chose to use this time to make these curtains (keep reading – I didn’t sew them!):

I LOVE them.

I found several sets of instructions on the internet, but they weren’t quite what I was looking for. I ended up improvising.

Looking to make your own? Here’s what I did and my curtains came about 1 inch past the windowsill – and they’re about an inch above the top of the window frame.

Measure your window – do you want your curtains to touch the windowsill, or come just below? Include that in your measurement.

Double the width. If your window is only 36 inches wide and your fabric is 42 inches wide, don’t worry about the excess width. It’ll just make it slightly more full.

Cut the fabric at least 7 inches longer than your window height. For my next set, I’d go for 8 or 9 inches longer, just to be sure I had enough of a seam.

The top seam was about 3 inches. My bottom seam was 2 inches. My side seams were 1 inch (to give them a cleaner look.) None of the tutorials that I found called for a side seam.

I used a fusible fabric strip to avoid sewing. I didn’t turn my sewing machine on once today! I ended up getting that fusible fabric at Hancock Fabrics on clearance for a quarter a roll (and I used just a little more than one roll.)

Now, I must find the perfect fabric for either our bedroom or the guest room. I’m dying to make more curtains and complete our house! (We threw a wrench into everything when we painted the master bedroom and started switching curtains around to match everything appropriately.)

What did you do with the weekend? 🙂