how to hem curtains if you are allergic to sewing

Yesterday I felt so stuck.  I couldn’t print off my resume because we didn’t have a printer cord.  I couldn’t download and explore a program because I should really wait until I have a new computer.  I  couldn’t start my new sketchbook because it was nowhere to be found.

So in order to have some feeling of control in my life, I decided to yank down the hideous curtains left by the previous tenant and put up the new ones that I had brought from home.

The curtains from home were a pair of white, Ikea tab-top curtains that had been purchased to hang in my old room, but had sat unused for years, mainly because they needed to be hemmed.  So yanking down those ugly blue and gold things kind of had some level of craft commitment attached to it.

After taking down the old curtains I threw up the new ones, and they puddled on the floor.  A lot.  Like 12 inches, at least.

I looked online for tutorials about what I should do, but I think this process is so simple that it didn’t really require one.  I did find this guide on Real Simple for how long your curtains should be, and you’ll see that I went with the less trendy version, where your curtains just skim the floor rather than break at the floor.  I chose that because these curtains frame a sliding glass door, and I knew we would be opening and closing them a lot for functional purposes.

When it came time to cut, all I did was mark on the curtains with a pencil where I thought they should hang.  I measured that, and then added four inches towards the bottom for my cutting line, so that I would have room to fold up the fabric and have a four inch hem.  I read on some site that It was important to have some kind of hem so that the curtains would hang properly, and I’m glad I did because I don’t think they would look right it it was just an inch or so.

I wound up cutting eleven inches off the bottom, and I measured that on all the edges to get a straight line.  I traced my marks with a pencil and cut off the excess with a pair of scissors.  Then I measured four inches above the line I had made for where the curtains should hit the floor (this was the first line and the fold line for the hem, I made three lines in this process.)  The most recent, highest line was where I adhered the Heat n Bond strip, so that the bottom would line up to it.

I ironed everything according to the directions, sometimes a little longer depending on if it stuck or not.  I did all my ironing using our ironing board on the floor because at the start of the project I discovered that it would not stand up.  Awesome.  So if your wondering why the curtains look so wrinkled, it’s because I would have had to hire a ninja to iron them properly.

The only major mistake I made was on the first panel I put the hem on the wrong side.  I was kind of freaked out at first, but luckily the way the curtains are made you would really have to be looking to tell the difference.  I just hung the hem on the back anyway and cut the tag off the front, and the adjusted so that the second panel was correct.

Here is the finished product.  It feels so much lighter in here and it’s so nice to be able to close the curtains.