fears are conquered!

who loves plain white curtains anyway? I do in fact, but we needed a spruce up in our family room and the curtains were begging for an update! When we were first married, Mr L. had a very interesting sense of decorating but he's come around and trusts WHATEVER I want to do with the house because he knows that it will look good, but this idea had us both a little nervous. I learned from my sister-in-law that if I wanted something changed around the house, the best time to do it was while the husband was at work. So I did just that and had an entire panel finished by the time he came home which meant there was no turning back.

After discussing my intentions with the curtains to a few friends and sisters, I finally mustered up the courage when I found a picture on Pinterest. (yes... My name is Meredith and I am addicted to Pinterest) Of course, I didn't pin the link and now I can't remember where I found it so I ended up making it up as I went along. Here is a step by step of how I did it. Feel free to make adjustments as you go along.

I found these bad boys at ikea (two panels for only $14.99!) In our last house, the sliding door was gigantic! it was 104 inches tall and finding any curtains that length was at least $40.00 a panel, thus began my love affair with ikea curtains. They come un-hemmed and at crazy long lengths! The one thing that made me nervous with this pair is that there were these stitched stripes vertical down the panels and I was nervous that it would end up making the curtains look like this weird plaid thing but the lines in fact saved... my... life! Because fabric is fabric and not always still, I used each stitched stripe as a measuring tool and measured down each vertical stripe marking as I went to make an even horizontal stripe. This ended up making each strip perfect across the whole panel and made it super easy to match up the two panels together!

I started by hemming the bottom to the length of door and the rod. The easiest way to do this is to take a charcoal pencil to them while they are hanging. This helps you know exactly where you want the curtain to fall once it has been hemmed. Add about a 1 inch seem allowance and chop off the extra fabric. To make sure there are no frays after they are hemmed the best way to do this is to fold the bottom by 1/2 inch over itself and then fold again, so that you are taking away an inch but the hem is only about 1/2 an inch like so:

Slide it through your sewing machine and you are good to go!

Now on to the striping! Like I said before I used the lines to mark downwards so that the stripes would be even across. I calculated that my painting area was 81 inches so I decided to make each stripe around 6 1/4 inches wide. Once I had the markings down I connected the stripes with white painter's tape. (My sil says that white tape doesn't bleed as much as the blue) Make sure that you tape the OUTSIDE of both sides of the stripe to be painted.

And now begins that painting! I mixed 1 part black paint to every 8 parts white to get the color that I wanted. I also used a mixture of fabric paint and acrylic paint because I like that way acrylic paint looks on fabric once it has been washed. To make extra sure that I didn't bleed under the tape I made a stripe down the middle and worked my way out with the brush to cover the edges.

There is no turning back now!!

This is only with one coat on. I was having guests over and needed to clean up the mess. As soon as I finish the second coat, I will add pictures of that too!