Curtains

After we bought our house we realized that the previous owners took the curtains with them. Bummer but it wasn't worth losing our house over so we let it go. So instead we have these lovely tarps up over the windows in the meantime. Hubby has been bugging me to make the curtains so yesterday I decided to do just that. 

Ages ago when I decided to make my own curtains instead of buying them I used a formula from this site (http://xoimagine.com/how-to-calculate-yardage-for-window-coverings-drapes-and-curtains/) to figure out how many yards of fabric I needed and then I went to the local fabric store and bought some home decor fabric. 

What do you think?  Pretty huh. And only $7 per yard. I suggest waiting until the fabric goes on super sale or it can get really pricey. 

The next step was trying to figure out how I wanted to hang my curtains. I'm thinking just a simple rod that slides into a pocket along the top edge of the curtain. I thought about lining the curtain but decided against it to save on money. 

Most of the pins I looked at involved curtains with lining so I just decided to wing it.  First I found out the width and length I needed the curtains to be. For instance, in the living room I have three windows in series on one wall that are about 128" wide and 80" from the top of the window to the floor. There were several ways to hang a curtain or curtains and I decided for this bank of windows to have two panels for each window, one on either side of each window. Kind of like this. 

After crunching the math I decided I would need six panels (my fabric width was 54" and I needed to cover 128" with extra width added for fullness). Six panels would work great giving me one panel on each side of the three windows.   If you smell something burning right now it's just the smell of my brain working overtime to figure all this out. 

I'll try to make it simple. You figure out the entire width you need to cover and multiply it by 2.5 for fullness. Add a few inches for seam allowance. Then divide that by the width of your fabric. This will give you the number of panels needed to cover that distance. Now you can choose to sew panels together to get one wide curtain or have several panels to cover the distance like me. It works out nicely because I have three windows all lined up next to each other. 

Now that I know how many panels I need I made a test panel to make sure all my measurements were correct. Since the height I need to cover is 80" I added 2" for a bottom hem and 8" for a pocket along the top. Again had to use some math to figure that out. I wasn't sure what diameter rod I would be using so I decided to just go big.  Adding 8" to the top will be a little less than four inches doubled over after seam allowance and will accommodate up to a 2" diameter rod comfortably. 

Okay now that all that was taken care of I cut out my fabric, 90" in length the entire width of the fabric. 

The salvedge had a nice frayed edge that looked neat so I simply folded it over on the sides a 1/4" and sewed a straight seam on the sides. 

Next I sewed the pocket along the top edge of the fabric by folding it over a 1/4", stitching a straight seam then folding it over 4" and sewing another straight seam. 

As you can see I used chip clips to keep it straight while I sewed because I hate ironing. 

Then we hung it up to check the length, which was perfect yay!  Then I stitched a two inch hem along the bottom to finish it all off. 

One down five to go. Wish me luck.