DIY painted curtains + tutorial

Thank you all for your lovely comments on my post yesterday! We went to Nota Bene (if anyone in Toronto wants to try somewhere new, for a special occasion, I highly recommend it!).

Today I am finally featuring a project that we completed in our uber productive weekend a couple of weeks ago! I thought I could post about it the day we finished, but the rod we had was wooden, and it really didn't look good dark, so I had to paint it white. Anyhoo...without further ado...

I started seeing these curtains a while ago, and posted about my search for bedroom curtains here. I couldn't find fabric in the scale of stripe that I wanted, so I decided to go the painting route! Recently some of my fave bloggers have shared their projects - check out The Design Pages and View Along the Way for a couple of examples.  Here's how mine turned out:

What do you think? I am loving them!

You can find tutorials around the web, but I was diligent in taking photos of the project this time so I am sharing my steps below:

1. Buy curtains - I went with Ikea Lenda tab top curtains. Iron them before you start your project so the paint will go on smoothly.

2. Choose a paint colour - I kept it simple by using leftover wall paint. We have a few patterns in the room so I wanted to keep the drapes pretty neutral. I bought a fabric medium that I added to the paint - it makes it slightly softer and less likely to crack. I didn't use the 1:1 ratio it recommended (solely because I didn't want to spend a lot of money on fabric medium). Here's the one I used - it was about $13 at DeSerres (art store):

3. Plan plan plan! Choose a pattern - I went with stripes. I was initially liking the large chevron patterns, but I decided to keep this easy.

Quite honestly, it took me MANY tries to figure out the measurements to get the coloured stripes where I wanted them! I wanted to keep it white close to the top (so I didn't have to paint the tabs), but didn't want a full stripe measurement up there...and I wanted white on the bottom to ensure they hung nicely.

4. Once that is done, measure your stripes / pattern and start taping. Note - I used a pen for measurements...as I was doing it Sarah Richardson popped in my head saying "You always use pencil when painting, pen shows through"...I thought that was only for walls - but no, it applies to fabric too! Use pencil.

Remember when you're taping to be consistent with inside / outside taping for your measurements. For mine, I taped on the "inside" of the white stripe lines (that's why they look narrower in the pic). I also put a piece of tape on the stripes that were to remain white - such a simple trick but it saved me a LOT of headaches and potential mistakes! It's probably my favourite new trick from this project.

5. Get painting! I mixed the fabric medium with the paint and used a small foam roller to paint, did two coats of colour:



6. Say some choice words for being careless with the paint when going from rolling pan to drape...argh!



7. Remove tape (I used frog tape and removed it after the paint was dry and it was a nice sharp line)

8. "Heat seal" the paint...this is what the fabric medium said to do - it's simple enough, you iron the painted sections once very dry with a cloth on top and underneath. To be honest, I'm not sure if it made a difference.

9. Hang your curtains and admire!