Double-Sided Curtain Tutorial

On Sunday it was "house work day" at our place.  Cole was going outside to weed-whack and do some yard work and all I really wanted to do was sew.

So I finally made curtains for our front door.  (My mom bought me a magnetic curtain rod ages ago but I'd never bothered to actually make curtains for it.)  



(1) Cole picked the fabric from a selection that I pulled out of my stash. It was something I got for $4/m when I worked at Northern Vacuum and Sewing and I was happy to give it up for curtains since I didn't have a project in mind for it and it was so darn cheap!

We wanted the curtains to be double sided so that people coming to the door also got to see pretty curtains and I was lucky that I had enough, just under 4 times the width of the window.

(2) First, I cut the border off from one end and decided it would be cute to have a ruffle border at the top as well as the bottom.  I made a teeny double fold hem on the bottom edge and stitched it down.

(3) The curtain was going to be just a little to short with the width of fabric (minus one border) so I decided to add some coordinating fabric from my stash.  I pretty much just made a big tube of coordinating fabric the width of my curtain.

I chose to stitch the ends down and leave a gap to turn it right side out and then folded this in half for the top of the curtain.  It wasted a lot of fabric to have the inside of the pocket be finished but I hate when curtain rods catch on seams.

(4) Picture of the "tube" right side out

(5) then I laid my curtain fabric right sides together and I just cut the whole length into two pieces.  Each piece worked out to just under twice the width of the curtain so I figured it would be a good amount of ruffle.

(6) I found the middle and laid one curtain piece facing up and one border also facing up.  How they would be when finished.

(7) Then I laid my "tube", folded in half, with the open end up.

(8) After that I laid the second border face down, with the second curtain piece facing down on top of it.  Essentially making a big sandwich of the layers.

(9) Lastly I made sure that the "tube" and borders were folded in from the corner so I wouldn't catch then when sewing and I pinned the whole way along.

I'm sure there are faster and more efficient ways of doing this but I didn't want to have to hem edges after and it was my first time making double sided curtains, or any curtains at all for that matter.

(10) then I sewed all the way around, leaving a hole at the bottom for turning.  I checked my top corners to make sure I hadn't caught the edges of the border (luckily I didn't, YAY!), and then I zig-zagged around to finish the seam.

Then I turned the whole thing right side out, pressed it and top stitched along the bottom edge to close the hole.

(11) The I hung them up and admired my handy work.  It even looks pretty from outside the door (12).

Sadly this project took longer than Cole's yard work but he's very happy with them and now thinks my summer project should be curtains for every room.

I personally think they would have been better and so much easier if he had let my do hanging tabs with cute little buttons but he was adamantly against it.

The best part was I got to spend the day sewing and listening to audiobooks and I got to call it housework.


1 project down, 49 to go
~KT