Customizing Drapes

I'm not much of a seamstress. I'm going to go ahead and get that out there. I do try. But I tend to bite off more than I can chew and my vision tends to be much bigger and better than my actual skill set. But I'm determined to work within my budget to get a particular "look" for certain rooms of my house. I certainly can't afford to pay for completely custom draperies or to "redo" entire rooms so here are two solutions that were budget friendly for my kids' spaces.

Fabric Paint
I started out looking for a ribbon that would unify lots of different colors in the bathroom for the boys. The towels are olive and moved here with us. As did the shower curtain and a few cute submarine themed items.


I decided to embrace the sub theme since this bathroom won't need to double as a guest bathroom. But I needed to tie the lime, olive and khaki colors. After going to every craft store in the DC metro area (or at least a huge representation of them) I still had not found a single ribbon that had all those colors. So plan "B" became fabric paint. I decided to paint "ribbon" on my curtain. And it worked! I ended up painting some submarines on there so the curtain wouldn't be so plain.



Of course my measurements didn't work out like planned so my last sub is "diving". But I think it turned out pretty cute and it cost less than $10 in supplies. And took only one evening after the kids were in bed to complete.

Ribbon and Scraps

My second project was for Caroline's room. There were no blinds or shades on her window so we needed something quick when we moved in. We ended up buying "blackout" style drapes in white at the home improvement store. I figured we could just hang the valance from her old room on top of it. Nope. It was 3 inches too short. So I used scraps from making her bedding to add some length to the bottom of the panels and then glued a pink ribbon down the length of the panel to balance out the color.


Pay no attention to the right side being one inch longer than the left. I carefully measured and cut the extra fabric before sewing it to the panels that were apparently not *quite* exactly the same length.



I also added the same ribbon to her simple white lamp shade and am making a ribbon/bow holder to hang on the wall.

The curtains aren't perfect, but I think they turned out pretty cute! They look great in their respective spaces and didn't break the bank. I can't wait to show you how I saved money on my living room curtains in my next post!