Hem Curtains with No Sew Tape

Hey everyone! I want to introduce myself. I’m Courtney and I’m from the eclectic lifestyle blog Fry Sauce & Grits. I blog with my two red headed sisters, we live over 1,700 miles apart (Utah and Alabama) and started our blog as a way to stay in touch and to inspire others to live a more creative, beautiful, and meaningful life! We love to share our passions for DIY, interior design, food, fashion, beauty, and making life more awesome! I’m also a certified bra fit specialist and love to educate women on how they should take care of their bosoms and wear the correct fitting bra, I have a ton of informative posts on this here. I’m so excited to tell you I’m one of the new contributors for Pretty Providence! I love their mission of how you can spend less and still live a fabulous life.

Like the majority of you I have to live on a tight budget. My husband is finishing his last year of his Masters and I stay home with our daughter and expecting a baby boy in May. Just because we don’t have a lot of money doesn’t mean I can’t live in a beautiful space, right? I have this space in my living room that has these two awesome north facing windows and right below them is a corner bench seat. It’s a great little spot, but I was feeling like it needed something to make this area pop and to frame those windows.

Well, a couple weeks ago I found a pair of these velvet lined curtains at Cost Plus World Market for $24 for a 50″ X 84″ panel!! That’s a freaking killer deal!

I didn’t want curtains that were going to block any light because these two large windows bring a lot of light into the room, and that’s all the light I have in this room (dumb room doesn’t have any overhead lighting, what were the original owners thinking?) Because of this I wanted these curtains just to have only purpose and that was to frame the bench seat windows.

The size of the curtains were pretty long 84″ and wide 50″. I knew that I would have to alter them to make them fit. I didn’t want the curtains to hang way long because I knew children would be playing on this window seat and didn’t kids sitting on the curtains and ripping them off the wall.

Also, my sewing machine is buried in a room where I’m storing all of my crap until I finish a remodel project in my laundry/craft/office room, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to dig it out to alter these curtains. So the thought came to me, why don’t I use some no sew adhesive tape to alter the curtains?! It was an aha moment for me.

Here is what you’ll need to do this easy project:

-Already made drapery

-Fabric scissors

-Heat bond (I had a sheet of it and cut it in 1 inch stripes)

-Iron and ironing board

-Measuring tape or mat or whatever you use to measure stuff

-Pen

-Hot glue gun

-Velcro tabs or strips

Like I mentioned above I wanted these curtains to hang on the sides of the windows and not block and light, so I decided to fold the curtains in half and cut them down the middle to make two of them which made them 25″ wide. Then I measured how long I wanted the curtains to be and 64″ long was the perfect length. So I chopped off 20″ off the bottom of both curtains.

*FYI, these curtains had a cotton liner and some of you might think this was so dumb of me, and that’s ok, but to make this project easy, I cut out the liner so I didn’t have to bond the liner to the curtain. I tried doing this with one of the panels and I regret doing it because you can see the curtain pucker in spots where I wasn’t able to get the liner to lay flat. Ugh, so I decided for the other curtain panel I was going to cut it out. :)

The next step you’re going to do is iron the no sew tape onto the raw edge fabric. I cut 1 inch strips to do this. Make sure to follow the instructions on this stuff, it will save you a lot of pain and grief!

After the no sew tape cools down, you’ll strip off the paper backing and then fold the raw edge over and then iron it slowly to get it to adhere. You’ll do this to the raw bottom and raw side edge of the curtain.

Because I had 20″ of this beautiful teal velvet fabric left over, I decided to make some tie backs with them. I took the nicely sewn edge of the bottom cut off piece and cut it to be 6″ long and 4″ wide.

Then I took the heat bond tape and ironed it on the raw edge and folded over the raw edges, and pressed on top of the edge to seal it.

I took my hot glue gun and hot glued velcro tabs on the ends of the tie backs so they’ll stick. I placed the tie backs in the middle and to give the curtains more shape. I felt because the curtains are short, they looked kind of lifeless just hanging there, and plus they were blocking some of the light. By making these two tie backs solved those two problems.

Here are my custom drapes I made from pre made drapes in my window bench seat. Yeah, I’m that person who has their Christmas tree up until mid January, please don’t judge! My house feels so empty without it.

I also did a really fun tutorial on how to make these DIY Short Copper Pipe Curtain Rods, go check them out here!