Not The Cheapest DIY Curtains Ever Made...

I'm very pleased with how these curtains turned out, and it's a good thing because the costs sure started to add up. I used painters' canvas drop cloths from Home Depot ($25), a cheap curtain rod from WalMart ($15), and some fabric ($10) and fusible spray adhesive ($15) to appliqué stars on the panels. Here's how I did it...

The drop cloth was one 9x12' piece. It shrunk to 8x11' in the prewash. I cut it into two 4x11" panels and hemmed the raw edge resulting from cutting it in half. I turned the top down 4", twice, for the header. I hemmed the bottom 4". They were still long enough to pool when hung from the 10' ceilings (I hung them 4" from the ceiling). 

I cut 3 sizes of star templates from newspaper, and then cut as many as I could from the 3 fabrics I chose (dark purple, zebra, and a purple/lavender polkadot). It was during this stage that I was nearly in tears thinking about all the time and money that was going into these drapes fearing they would look too "homemade" and dorky.  

I arranged the stars on the panels which I laid out on my living room floor. I applied Spray N Bond fusible adhesive on the back of each star and ironed it to the panel right there on my living room floor. 

This was a birthday surprise for my daughter, and I only had a couple hours to hang the curtains (and execute some other projects) while she was at dance rehearsal. But I pulled it off!  And the curtains turned out amazing, in my humble opinion :) 

The rest of the room makeover can be seen here!