DIY Lined Curtains

 Over the past two weeks, I have been working on curtains for our living room.  My husband was (mostly jokingly) complaining about the lack of curtains in the living room and dining room.  We ended up getting the previous owners to leave all window treatments for us which was really nice in the case of the blinds in the office and the beautiful Roman shades in the full bath.  Most of the curtains in the house, however, were not my taste and did not go with the new paint colors on the walls.  I do like the curtain rods in the living room so I put those back up after painting.

Anyway, back to making curtains.  I ordered the fabric from fabric.com because I couldn't find anything I liked at the local fabric stores.  I followed this awesome tutorial from House of Hepworths pretty much to a t.  By the way, the fabric that she uses on her curtains is amazing and they sell it at fabric.com as well. 

The cat decided to "help" with the process of making curtains.  Needless to say, he got locked in the basement for most of the time I was working on these.

I began by measuring the length for the panels and added some extra length at the bottom to account for seams and such.  I decided I wanted two panels on each window even though the windows are rather narrow.  I like being able to push them to the side instead of using a tie-back.  There was a lot of prep work involved in the process before the actual sewing happened but it was fun.

There was a lot of ironing.  I broke our ironing board while working on the bookshelf project so I am using an ironing pad on our dining room table.

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Ironing the lining.  I used cheap twin flat sheets just like in the tutorial.

Pinning the lining underneath

Trimming the excess lining.  I didn't follow the tutorial exactly here.  She pinned the top and opposite side and then sewed those before trimming and pinning the other side.  I trimmed and pinned the other side and then sewed the whole thing all at once.

Finally sewing!

After I finished these steps on all six curtain panels, I hung them and pinned them up to the length I needed them to be.  In the tutorial, she left them up and hand sewed the hem.  I took mine down because I had quite a bit of excess at the bottom and I am not the greatest hand sewer.  I trimmed a bunch of excess from the bottom then sewed the hems on the sewing machine.

They turned out great and I am so thankful that there are so many great tutorials like this one out there.

Now I am eager to find some fabric for the dining room curtains.  But I also need to find rods for the dining room because Roman shades were the previous window treatment.