Last night after waiting for a basement company to show up {they never did} for a free estimate, we headed over to Eugene’s parents’ place to celebrate his dad’s birthday. Yeah for family birthdays & yeah for turtle ice cream cake!
This weekend, I bonded with my sewing machine again. Since I had a pretty decent time making kitchen curtains, I set out to make some sheer white ruffle curtains for our bathroom window, and I’m excited to share my final product.
I LOVE how they turned out! How about a bit more details on the process? Well, here’s the original window. Yucky old blinds included.
I removed the blinds, hung the simple curtain rod {$3 or so at Walmart} a few inches higher and a few inches wider than my window. Then I measured the amount of fabric I would need and added roughly 3 inches to the top, 1 inch to each side, and 2 inches to the bottom for my seams. I sewed a pocket for the rod and left 1 1/2 of fabric above for a ruffle at the top. Oh, and I love to use pinking shears to cut the edges so that I don’t have to worry about turning them under twice and I don’t use as much fabric.
Once I got the basic curtains completed, I tested them out on the window to make sure I measured correctly.
Once I knew the basic curtains were all set, I cut long strips {again, using pinking shears so that they won’t unravel} about 1 inch to 1 1/2 inches wide {I didn’t really measure, because I didn’t want them to look perfectly precise.}
From there, I adjusted my sewing machine stitch length to the highest it would go {4} and sewed straight down the middle of the strips without backstitching {that’s important…don’t backstitch!}.
You also want to leave a few inches of thread attached from where you started and ended sewing down the middle.
Using that extra thread, you want to pull just one of the threads gently & bunch your fabric down. As you do this, your ruffle will begin to form.
Continue gently pulling on the thread & bunching the fabric until your whole strip becomes ruffled.
After I made a whole bunch of ruffled strips, I pinned them to the bottom of my curtains. This part I did measure just to make sure the horizontal lines were straight and matched on both panels.
When I had to combine two strips of ruffles, I simply pinned one overtop of the other. Because I used the pinking shears on all the edges, it wasn’t obvious at all where the strips of ruffles joined.
Once I had all three ruffled lines pined, I switched my machine stitch length back to normal {2} and carefully sewed straight down the middle of each ruffle. This is necessary even if you don’t want to attach your ruffle to a curtain because the first time you sewed the ruffles it was just a basting stitch, it won’t actually hold the ruffle together.
I also lessened the pressure foot tension, which probably helped some too. I made sure to stitch slowly, using my fingers to push the fabric through steadily.
Once each ruffle was securely attached to the curtain, I was good to go!
Pretty pretty ruffles!
I bout the fabric, 4 yards, for $16 with a coupon & sale price. I only used half for this project, and the curtain rod was only about 3 bucks, so for $11 I have a sweet new curtain. I used the remaining 2 yards of fabric to add ruffles to something else in the bathroom, but I’ll save that for another post.
Oh, and for more on our bathroom updates, including the painted tile & removed coyote stamped border, click here. Hope ya’ll like the simple ruffled curtains – I certainly do! :)
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