Remember many moons ago when my friend Erin and I surprised our friend Jill with a low-budget room makeover while she was on vacation?

…and I was all, “BRB with the curtain tutorial!”

Sorry.

We got a little distracted with the whole master bedroom paint situation, then Andy and I went out of town last weekend and also the dog ate my homework.

(We went to Pittsburgh last weekend to watch two beautiful friends get hitched. We rented a fabulous convertible and ate enough food for four months. It was amazing.)

But yes! I want to tell you about the curtains we made!

We felt like the room needed something to bring attention up, to help the ceilings feel a little taller and to balance out the pattern and “weight” of the bottom half of the room, plus we wanted to include an element that felt a little more handmade and imperfect, to keep the room from feeling too serious about its life.

And ideally, we were hoping for something that would pull out some color from the lumbar pillow on the sofa, so we thought these curtains from Anthropologie would be PERFECT.

Only one tiny problem: the price. (Cursed budget strikes again!) They’re $99 per panel in the size we’d need, and even if we could spend $200 of our entire $500 budget on curtains (which, no.) – they’re sold out.

So Erin and I got creative and just um, you know, made some.

Materials:

• One pair of Ikea Vivan curtain panels (or other simple white curtains)
• About 4.5 yards of fabric for the diamonds (you could also use an old sheet or something if it’s in a color you like.)
• No-sew hem tape

(It’ll cost you about $20 to make both panels! Niiice.)

Here’s the short version: this pattern is basically just strips of fabric ironed onto the curtain panels in a diamond pattern with hem tape. Our curtains have 5 full diamonds and 5 half diamonds, but the anthropologie version has an extra row of diamonds that we chose to skip.

1. Cut strips of fabric

Each strip should be 1.5 inches wide. This is the fastest way we found to cut a TON of strips of fabric from one large piece of fabric: first, fold the fabric in half width-wise…

and then again in half length-wise. Then measure out every 1.5 inches with measuring tape and make a little notch with your scissors.

And just continue to cut down each notch until you’re left with a nice spaghetti bowl of fabric strips.

Each strip will be 1.5 inches wide and 4.5 yards long, and will be enough to make one full diamond. Hooray!

2. Attach your first diamond

You’ll just use the iron-on hem tape to attach the strips in a diamond pattern on the curtain panel. The Ikea Vivan panels are 57 inches wide, so each diamond should end up being about 19 inches wide from corner to corner. This is how it all shakes out, and the order we did each diamond:

Starting at that top corner, lay out your hem tape underneath a strip of fabric and iron the fabric to the curtain panel according the instructions on your hem tape. (We found it MUCH easier to do this on the floor than on an ironing board!)


To do the corners of the diamonds, just fold the strips back over on themselves. This whole deal is supposed to feel imperfect, so much grace is granted to you at this point.

Continue to move in a spiral from the outside of the diamond toward the center until you have one completed diamond! Yay!

Go through and finish all the full diamonds. This, again, is the order we went in:

3. Do all the half-diamonds

The half-diamonds on the edges are basically the same situation which by now you’ve perfected into an art form and will be taking on the road to audiences across the country. Only difference is the inside of the half diamond feels a little different, but you’ll have no problem with it. It should end up looking like this:

You’ll also need to trim them on the edges so they’re nice and neat.

4. Hang ’em high and wide!

This was a very simple project you can do on the living room floor while rewatching old seasons of The Office for at least the 8th time, and still feeling incredibly uncomfortable about Michael’s toast at Jim & Pam’s wedding.

View Along the Way: where you can get your fill of outdated pop culture references, five years after they happened.

(It’s a niche market.)

What’s your fave show that’s no longer relevant?

PS: in the mood for more inexpensive knock-off projects? Check out ’em out right here, or check out these 27 (more) brilliant DIY curtain ideas: