How to Make Curtains

There are plenty of tutorials on how to make curtains, so I won’t belabor the basic steps: you essentially need to get a giant rectangular piece of fabric (or in most cases, 2 giant rectangular pieces of fabric) up onto curtain rods.

This post has what I learned outside of everything else that’s out there on this topic including tips on how I would have made life easier for myself if I had to do this again. Included is a big sewing tip and a cost estimate summary.

A quick overview:

1. It is A LOT more work than what I was led to believe when I read tutorials online. It’s possible that I’m slower than your average curtain DIYer. Likely, even. And a self-imposed extension of my timeline has to do with the fact that I sweat over the small details!
   1. Although I will admit I think most people were sewing one or two curtains whereas I was doing my whole house, so the task for me seemed monumental.
   2. I don’t mean just the sewing, either; hanging the rods was a lot of work too.
2. The fabric you use matters. This is both the design and the fabric type and thread count / weight.
3. There may actually be times where buying curtains will be cheaper than making them.

My starting point was a newly constructed home with ram board (really thick craft paper that you put on the ground to protect your floor while moving) as window coverings because I underestimated the amount of work making curtains would take (please reference #1 above). So our whole house was this (warning: there is going to be A LOT of mess in these photos as we had just moved in!):

It was not pretty for a little while!

Tips on fabric:

On fabric shopping: I would not advise heading online first. I know I know, the pictures are so pretty. But really. Go to stores, feel the materials, know the difference. You can certainly order fabric swatches online but sometimes you still can’t really tell how it will look and feel at a larger scale. One store I went to actually had some of their own fabric made into curtains on display which was nice and made for some easy decisions:

• Material: If you are not picky about the material, certainly prioritize the design and size and forget about the fabric material. But if you do care, know what you want and how much it should cost. For example, I wanted natural, more hypoallergenic materials, such as cotton and linen, in the bedrooms that get used the most. One guy wanted to sell me what was supposedly 100% linen for $6/yard. I got away from that lying liar real fast. Good 100% linen would not be sold for that cheap. 100% linen also drapes differently than what he was selling which I’m convinced was polyester — which is fine, if that’s what you want.

• Design: Go with a repeat pattern. It will make it easier to cut straight! Cutting straight is so hard especially at this scale.
• Weight: For newbies, I would recommend going with something heavier and thicker also to help you cut straight; it doesn’t shift around as much. For example, fabric with a lower thread count can be misaligned sideways while still laying flat on the ground, leading you to believe it’s straight so you’re cutting straight, and then when you go to sew it, you find out the awful truth! (Ask me how I know :sob:)
• In the photo below, the fabric swatch on the left is a very lightweight fabric and it features a medallion in an offset repeat pattern. The swatch on the right is thicker, and also has an offset repeat design. The fabric on the right was easier to work with in measuring, cutting, and sewing.

• Blackout curtains: No real tips from me here; I did incorporate blackout fabric into two pairs of curtains. I wasn’t terribly picky. I got some in white and a bit more in black. It is affordable and easy to work with because it’s thick.

Tips on measuring and sewing curtains:

• I read everywhere about the “get curtains that are 1.5-2x as wide as the rod length” to create curtains that had a nice ruffle. This was SUPER challenging considering most fabric bolts — the width of your future curtain panel — come in very specific sizes that were too narrow for this purpose. I don’t know how or why this keeps getting recommended as to me it’s not easily achievable realistically. One solution is to sew two panels together lengthwise to obtain the desired width. I very quickly nope-d on that one and some of my curtains are not as fluffy as I originally imagined, but I would rather have flatter curtains than prolong this process. Another solution is to get a fabric where the pattern is turned horizontally (“railroaded”) and the bolt width — which becomes your length / height, floor to ceiling — is very wide. That way you can unravel the bolt to any width you want.
• I used the planks on my floor as a guide on what straight is.
• I taped the fabric to the ground so it would stop moving whenever I touched it. It also made it easier to measure to cut the length to size. (“To size” for me was a pretty loose guideline; I actually didn’t hem the bottom until after I hung it to make sure I could get the bottom as close to the ground as I could.):

• I used my sewing ruler (I’m sure that’s not what this is called, but I mean a small ruler with a perpendicular piece that moves) to try to get the side hems even. In all but one of my curtains, I sewed a lining. In this example, I was sewing blackout lining. So after I measured and I taped down the decorative fabric to the floor, right side down, I laid the lining on top of it and then measured 2cm in for the first fold:

• Then I folded over the decorative fabric and then folded it over again to hide the raw edges and pinned it:

• When I ran out of pins I also used clips:

• Oh, also!! I wanted more stiffness in the header because I was afraid it would flop over once hung. I don’t know if this is actually necessary but I made my life harder by buying rolls of this curtain header and sewing it in. I tried various ways of incorporating it and it doesn’t matter how, just make sure it’s long / wide enough and won’t slip down:

• Depending on how you plan to hang your curtains, you may just sew the straight rectangles if you plan on using clips, in which case, you really don’t need curtain header tape. If you are wanting to use the pointy hooks and don’t want to stab holes in your fabric, you need to incorporate header tape that has slots for hooks; or make your life continuously harder by taking into consideration the slots for the hooks while sewing the header. I calculated where I wanted the pins to go and put two pins horizontally next to each other. When I was sewing the header closed and got up to a pin, I stopped sewing, moved the fabric past the second pin, and re-started sewing, effectively leaving a gap where the pin can nicely slide in without ripping anything. (sorry if the image below is confusing — it’s actually the second panel on top of the first one; I was using the first panel as a guide on where to place the pins and leave the gaps)

• One of the many details when sewing a pair of curtains is how they look when they meet in the middle when closed. The most aesthetically pleasing setup is one that looks like a continuous flow of the decoration from left to right, meaning no break in the pattern when the curtains are closed. Using solid fabric, a striped pattern, or an intentionally non-patterned design eliminates the need to think about this. However, if you are using a pattern that will look messed up if messed up, keep in mind you will have to take the second panel into consideration when making the first one.
• The biggest biggest best tip I have is how to hold the fabric while sewing. I kept ending up short even if I used a walking foot. One of the many many videos I watched gave me this tip and I am so sorry I can’t remember who it was to properly give credit (I watched SO MANY videos). You basically need to bend the fabric taut before and after it goes under the sewing foot instead of just letting it just loosely go through via the feed dogs:

After I started incorporating this method, I was sooo much less frustrated when looking at my final product.

GREAT! Now that your curtains are made, it’s time to hang them! The hard part is done!

…is it?

After poring over details about measurements, cost, fabric, lining, curtain rods, and curtain rings, we were FINALLY ready to get rid of that ram board room by room! We bought a laser level specifically for this purpose. My imagination led me to believe that a laser level would work magically: you could set the thing anywhere and it would just >BOOM< beam straight lines wherever you want it. I was SO WRONG!

You need to have your laser level within 3 degrees or so up or down relative to where the horizontal beam is supposed to go. Since I wanted my curtain rods very close to the ceiling, we had to get the laser level up almost 9 feet. Mind you, once the laser level is set up, you can move it left/right as far as it can cast a beam. But the hard part is getting it that high. In each room we had to rig something up…

Tips on hanging curtain rods:

• Purchasing the laser level was worth it.
• Have your own screws and anchors handy — the ones that come with the rod hardware may not be good.
• If you buy telescoping / adjustable rods: buy curtain tape! My curtains kept getting stuck and.. well, I’ll just let my Instagram reel showing this explain it:

How to stop your curtains from getting stuck on your curtain rod:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chloe at Henlo Home (@henlohome)

It took several weeks to do my whole house. I saved so much money though. There were two instances where I bought instead of made, which were:

1. The fabric for my desired curtain did not exist (I attempted to make a dupe of an existing curtain). So I bought it off retail.
2. I wanted a light-filtering liner for the guest room. I found the perfect liner at Ikea for much much cheaper than if I would have purchased the fabric and made it.

Be aware that your pets may like your curtains too:

Ok yes, that was a shameless plug on my animals 😀 Ok, here are more finished photos. Here’s the curtains I made for my office. This lovely yellow fabric is from Spoonflower — it’s the Cypress Cotton Canvas in Sashiko Golden Yellow Large lined with 100% cotton lawn fabric I purchased online.

Here’s another shot of the blue linen. My husband selected this blue medium-weight linen for his man cave. He plays video games in there, so it was really important the room could get really dark. The color scheme in his room is darker (more MANLY) so it didn’t look right with the lighter blackout fabric, so I bought black blackout fabric.

Curtains are so hard to take photos of because it’s directly against the light source and/or in a dark room!

Cost breakdown 💸

Ok. So how much did it all cost?? Here’s the cost breakdown. This shows total cost including shipping when applied.

Almost $2k for (mostly) DIY curtains including hardware for 7 windows and 1 sliding door, or about $250 per installation (the curtains I bought from West Elm really brought this average up)! This can obviously be higher or lower depending on your exact components. For what I wanted, this was way cheaper than getting curtains made and installed — I estimate that a professional installation would have run me a few or several thousand dollars. And after having done this once, I can see why :grumble:

Any regrets?

If I were to have one purchase regret, it would be the quatrefoil curtain rings. Yes, they are SUPER cute and unique. And I have my phases here and there where I commit to spending money for nice design. But I’m not sure this is where those extra bucks should have gone. I can hardly see them because they are up so high. The regular round rings were a little more than half the price of these ($57 vs $36 for 20 rings):

As I said above, I’m really happy with them… but I also hope to not have to make these again! I leave you with some more photos:

So, what do you think? Is the time spent and flexibility gained worth the cost savings?

Item	Price ($USD)
Fabric (by the yard unless otherwise indicated)
~20 yds decorative + 6 yds blackout in white from Roma Deco in DTLA	$475
7 yds decorative from Fabrics-Store.com	$104
6 yds blackout in black from onlinefabricstore.com	$66
6 yds lining from mytextilefabric.com	$34
7 yds decorative from Spoonflower	$231
10 yds lining from Joann	$66
1 pair light filtering finished curtain from Ikea	$10 (? I think. something cheap)
1 pair finished curtain from West Elm	$366
Hardware
2 curtain rods; curtain rings from Ballard Designs	$282
3 curtain rods from Bed Bath & Beyond	$124
Curtain rods, rings, pins from Amazon	$150
Misc
5 various spools of thread from Joann	$18
Buckram/Header tape from Amazon	$13
4 rolls of 12′ curtain tape	$40
GRAND TOTAL	$1979