Thrifty curtains…

We found this fantastic pair of curtains in a charity shop, perfect for our living room – see how boring the old curtains were?

And the new curtains? Chintztastic.

We have two large windows but there was only one pair of curtains, luckily they were over twice the width of our windows so I thought I’d just cut them in half.

Imagine my joy when I got them home and found out they had a central seam!

I got out my trusty stitch ripper and hacked them in two. The header tape ran across the seam so I just cut it in half, sewed it down and tied the threads to secure them. A lot of hemming later, they looked like this:

Don’t they look much better? They cost £5, and took about an hour to fix.

Anyone remember that Ikea advert, Chuck out your chintz? I would have killed to know the location of that skip!

Beccy

Teatowel to kitchen curtains tutorial

Ok, not the hardest refashion in the world, but these are the kind I like – that “oh, yeah!” moment when you see the obvious for the first time (it happens to me an awful lot!)

The thing about teatowels is that they are made for kitchens, albeit without the intention of them being curtains. Well, these teatowels cost £2 for five from a charity shop and I can’t pass up a bargain (I bought 10)! Plus, they were perfect for my kitchen, but too perfect to dry dishes on.
I decided I wanted cafe-style curtains – the idea is to block out peering eyes at night rather than block out the world entirely.

Teatowels are perfect because they have ready bound edges. Unfortunately, they weren’t wide enough for my windows. The little window needed 1 1/2 towels and the big one needed 3, but if anything, this made the curtains better!
I laid them out on the floor to match the colours. These were five differently striped towels, thick, thin and with subtly different colours. I cut two down the centre lengthways and sewed three of the halves each  to a full towel, making sure the ready bound edges were on the, um, edges.
Rather than cutting to fit, I folded the top over and sewed to make deep channels. Then I slotted them onto sprung curtain cord, screwed little hooks into the ends, and attached these to large cuphooks screwed into the window(I love cuphooks, they are my friend).
I loved the curtains so much, I replaced the large curtain covering a gap under the counter in the same way, only this time I used more teatowels.

The strip at the top is all I had left of the previous 5 towels, a half cut in half again widthways and sewn together, the other three are whole towels.
All in all, I used 8 towels, at a cost of £4. I already had the cord, but you could use cafe poles - they are extendable, so will fit any window. I already had the cuphooks too, so this was a pretty cheap thrifty project :)
Beccy