Monday Made It: Classroom Curtains

I'm completely surprised to tell you this, but my blog was nominated as a finalist for Really Good Stuff's classroom blog contest in the "Best New Blog" category. (Side note to whoever nominated me: Wow, thanks!) I guess I feel sort of humble, just plugging away over here sharing my ideas with you. I'm nominated with some pretty fabulous bloggers, but if you enjoy reading my blog I'd love a vote. You should check out the other categories while you're there too. Amazing!

Okay, blushing aside... I'm linking up with Tara over at 4th Grade Frolics again for Monday Made It where we can link up to share some of the crafty things we've made for our classrooms. Today I'm sharing our new classroom curtains with you. I hang them on our door's window as well as the actual exterior windows too. They are surprisingly easy, promise!

I stuck it on our front door to show it hanging.

The size of your curtains will depend on the size of your windows. For our door, I cut my fabric 20x13". Just remember that you'll want to cut your fabric slightly wider than needed to make up for the gathers you'll add to your curtains. How tightly you gather the curtains will depend on how much extra fabric you'll need to add. Our finished size ends up being 9.5" across the top.

When it's time to sew, I hem my curtains all the way around by double turning over the bottom and left/right edges. I like to do a skinnier hem so I turn the edge over about a quarter of an inch two times, iron it smooth, and then sew it down. I do the sides first.

Next, I do the top and bottom edges. Because I'm going to gather the top, I turn the top over one time instead of two. When using fabric with a pattern like these dots, I try to turn my edges over along the pattern so it will look uniform on the front. The top of my curtains are facing you, so you can see how it's turned one time.

After sewing the top and bottom, the curtains are now hemmed all the way around. They look like placements at this point. ;)

Now it's time to gather. This intimidated me at first, but it's actually really easy. I upgraded to a gathering foot so my sewing machine automatically gathers the curtains for me now, but before that I had to do it myself. I like to use a zigzag stitch for that. There's a really good tutorial here that shows you how. If you're using a gathering foot, I like to sew at a tension of 8 and stitch length of 4.5. The bottom curtain in this picture is right off the machine. The top curtain has been ironed and attached to a magnet already.

Now you're ready to hang up your curtains. Our window frames are all magnetic so I don't bother with curtain rods. I add an adhesive magnetic strip to the top of our curtains and pop them right on easily. I've also used hot glue to attach magnets before in a pinch. Either way works.

I think the curtains make our room so much cozier and help tie in our color scheme too. 

Now that's enough about curtains. Click on over to see the other Monday Made It posts and be sure to check back here for my next one. I'm excited to see yours too!