Do It Yourself Decorating
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Curtains, Drapery & Panels
Making Your Own Curtains and Draperies
Curtains and other sill or floor length treatments are great for adding privacy, temperature control, eliminating some of the street noise and also help with noise inside the room. You can make them totally simple or completely over the top. Your choice.
Think of curtains as a frame for your picture (the view you have outside). If you don't have a view, then they can be a focal point in your room if you need one. Just be sure you don't have too many focal points.
Unless you have a blind, shade or sheers underneath a fabric treatment, I always recommend lining your curtains with a good drapery lining. This will protect the fabric from fading, sun rot and moisture, give it more body and make it feel and appear richer/fuller.
If you are a fairly experienced seamstress, even go so far as interlining. This will give you the look and feel of very high end curtains and draperies and make them last even longer! (I wouldn't bother with this if this is a treatment you only plan to have a couple years.)
If you add all these fabric layers, your curtains and other treatments will tend to be heavy and you'll want to be sure you have adequate hardware to hold them up!
curtains
~ Curtain with a rolled heading, or what I call a Cuffed Drapery. Depending on the fabric your use for these, they can be drop dead gorgeous or funky casual.
~ Calculating yardage for solid draperies.
~ Cuffed Draperies - adding a cuff at the top makes a real difference, and isn't difficult to do.
~ Skyline Panels - These curtains are actually quite nice when the light shines through!
~ Flag Window panel - these curtains would work great in any theme room. You use an actual flag.
~ Simple Shower Curtains from decorator fabric.
~ Sheer Fabric & Bamboo panel - this is gorgeous, and meant to be left in place like sheers would be for some privacy.
Kids Curtains
~ Decorating Kid Rooms - Ideas you can use for curtains window treatment ideas for your kids.
Here's an idea for a tab top curtain.
This is a little different than most of the tab top curtains you see. Why? Because I don't really like how flat they are, so I used a band and attached a gathered piece of fabric to it, so I could have more fullness.
This was actually made for a shower curtain, so you can imagine how flat and sheet-like it would look pulled all the way across the shower opening if it didn't have the gathered fabric in there.
See how I used the stripes? I ran them horizontal for the top band, verticle for the main body and then cut out stripes to use for the tabs, and used one of the colored stripes to cover buttons.
If you're making one of these for the kids' room, use contrasting or coordinating colors and fabrics for the curtain, tabs, buttons and top band.