How to hem curtains and sheers

What kind of curtains are perfect for a little girl’s room?  Why, pink curtains of course!  I finally got Leah’s curtains up.  I had to figure out how to hem curtains and sheers but I’m so excited how much homier the room is starting to look!

I love the combination of Benjamin Moore’s Bird’s Egg with the pink curtains.  And the sheers add a nice soft glow to her bedroom.

The one problem was that the sheers were crazy wrinkly and looked like this when I took them out of the package.  I tried my steamer, but they were too thin for the steam to do anything:

The other problem was that they were about 3″ too long.  I wanted to hang the curtain rod up near the ceiling, but 7ft long sheers were not going to be long enough, so I had to go with the 8ft sheers.

I folded over the bottom of the sheers while they were still hanging.  With the fabric being so see-through I only had two options for folding, either an inch and a half that I show in the photo directly below (which I later decided wasn’t enough), or a full 3″.

It’s hard to tell in the photos (which was the idea) that I folded over the exact height of the existing hem.  Any differently and it would have been super obvious that it didn’t match up:

So the hem ended up looking like this in the end:

Next I had to iron… and iron… and iron… and iron some more.  I used relatively low heat to get all the wrinkles out, but it was definitely a worthwhile effort.

The pink curtains had the same problem with being too long, except they had to be hemmed by about 6″.

It was too big of a hem to just eyeball it all, plus there was nothing to match it up to this time.  So I had to use a measuring tape every few inches and then iron it to get the exact width that I wanted to hem:

I started by measuring, folding by 3″, ironing, then measuring, folding another 3″ and ironing again.

Then I pinned it all in place (although, after ironing, it really wasn’t going anywhere):

And I sewed the hem as close as I could to the fold:

So the hem on the pink curtains ended up looking like this:

Now, the curtains float about an inch or so above the floor:

The pink curtains were the best bargain!   A last chance sale from IKEA – $5 for the set of two!  I was totally undecided for the longest time, but when I saw that sale, I figured for $5 I could totally put them up and if I ever change my mind I won’t feel guilty changing them!

I used a double curtain rod for the curtains, so the sheers are behind, and the pink curtains are in front. Sorry, I know that’s difficult to see in the photos.

Did I mention I had to iron the pink curtains too?  This project definitely exercised my iron and ironing board!   There’s only so much you can do during nap time, so it took a couple days to get through it all.  But the room is looking amazing!  I can’t wait to keep going!

Source : onelittleproject.com
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