Striped Drop-Cloth Curtains

The great room switch of 2011 is almost complete! I'm looking forward to showing how it turned out, but for this week how about a peek at the window in the boys' room? Deal?

So there you can see the John Deere green walls, maps all over (have I mentioned how much I love them?!) and a striped drop cloth window treatment. What you don't see is that I haven't cut-in around the ceiling. Nope. You don't see that at all. Riiiiight...

Here are the easy steps to making your own $10 no-sew window treatment. Ok, $10 is just for the drop cloth. The quart of paint was another $8 or so, but I used it for their closet too, and I have leftovers!

Start by measuring in your window and deciding how wide you want your curtain to be. Cut your (laundered) drop cloth to the right size. My window was wider than the drop cloth, so I cut a piece off the bottom and hot-glued it onto the side. Oh yes, I did!

Measure the width of your stripes and apply painter's tape. I chose 6-inch vertical stripes. 

Paint the wider sections with a small sponge roller. Remove tape while the paint is still wet. 

(The paint will soak through the drop cloth, so if you care about your floors, put something under it! Hmm, maybe a drop cloth?)

This is when you hurriedly rip off the tape, carry the wet cloth to the basement to dry, wipe up the paint that seeped onto the kitchen floor and make supper. 

About a week later, you decide enough is enough and go hang that thing!

The next picture shows my lack of measuring. What I claim is that the drop cloth shrunk when I washed and dried it. Right? Doesn't that happen? I wish I had noticed, because, like I said earlier, I had added a section with hot glue and it worked perfectly. Oh, why didn't I a bigger section?! I might still. You never know around here.

My weapon of choice for this project was a stapler. One of those heavy-duty ones. Yup!

As you can see above, I stapled the bottom of the curtain with the right side facing the window. Then, as you can see below, I gently folded and stapled sections the width I wanted.

For the top section, you can slip the stapler under the curtain and attach the curtain to the wall. I chose to use a small strip of mdf, wrap my curtain around it and nail the whole she-bang to the wall. Works for me!

Sure, it might not be the conventional way to hang a curtain, but I got the look I was going for, it will hang precisely how I left it, and it hides the white blinds perfectly!

Now to just cut-in around the ceiling! 

Do you ever put off the last 10% of a project?

Hate cutting-in? 

Use a stapler to hang curtains?