AT Reader Jen asks:Any ideas for fun draperies for the babies room? I don't want to spend a fortune and of course I love the draperies at Anthropologie but I am trying to be frugal. The room is going more eclectic than little kiddish. Any advice?
We feel your pain - we are a little in love with Anthropologie's curtains, too. That red damask of theirs (left) is fabulous in person. But the trick is to figure out what you like about their patterns, and then DIY it!
When we had to put curtains up fast (to stage an apartment for sale), we put up curtain rods with crystal ball finials, and then headed for the fabric store. Since we have no idea how to sew, and don't own a sewing machine, we just bought yards of fabric in a pattern we loved, and some handy 'no-sew' tape. Fold an 8 inch pocket at one end of the length of fabric, slide in the no-sew tape, and iron it, for an instant seam. Insert the pocket around the curtain rod, screw on the finial ends, and toss the whole thing up on the curtain brackets, and voila! Instant curtains. This is a Joel Dewberry fabric from Reprodepot (one of our favorite online fabric haunts) - if you like the Anthropologie damasks, he does great ones!
What trips people up when doing DIY curtains is the weights. You need weight at the bottom to keep them from flipping up and looking like a bedsheet draped over a curtain rod. We used these - but you can get them at any fabric or craft store.
Not only were our 'curtains' super cheap, but they got tons of compliments at our open house. And best of all, if we get tired of them, down they come, to be be chopped into pillowslips, tea towels, and possibly some dining room chair slipcovers. Just surfing around a bit we found some great possibilities for our own nursery, which is currently curtainless.
left to right: Mojo Watermelon, Braemore Tree of Life (which reminds of Anthropologie's Botany Curtains), and Hippy Bus. Hippy Bus! Check out the little wandering guitar player!
That is what we did, and for $75 for three windows, we were very pleased with the results and the cost. AT readers, what would you do if you wanted cool nursery curtains and didn't want to pay a fortune for them? We bet you all have some very creative solutions!
Andy & Andrew's Vintage Modern
Before & After: MacBook Dye Project
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Deep Mountain Maple...
How To Cook a Steak: 15 Recipes for a Weeknight Valentine's Meal
How To Cook a Steak in the Oven
Comments (3)
I've seen a beautiful (and incredibly expensive) Designer's Guild fabric I'd like to use for the curtains in my daughter's room which are floor to ceiling jobbies and would be prohibitively expensive. On a programme here on English TV one of the designers bought some really inexpensive dust sheets (for covering furniture when decorating) which were a nice beigey/parchment sort of coloured coloured cotton and edged them (around 6 to 8 inches around each side) with the expensive fabric. They looked really good and cost a fraction of what it would have cost to have used the accent fabric allover. In fact, I think they looked better than if she'd splurged and used the expensive fabric only which may have been a bit much.
If you happen to see fabric you like in sheets, it's really easy (and no-sew) to turn a flat sheet into a curtain, as long as your window goes no higher than the length of a sheet:
1. Buy enough sheets to give you at least half again the width of the window. So if you have a 5' wide window, you want two double sheets, not one.
2. Find the wide top seam of the sheet, the one that looks almost like a cuff. That cuff is going to be your casing that slides over the rod.
3. The cuff is always sewn closed at the edges. Unpick that edge seam.
4. Slide the casing over the rod... voila! curtains! And because they're gathered along the rod, they look like normal curtains.
i purchased curtains from ikea and cut them short so they would go from the ceiling to the bottom of the window (about waist high). then i screwed in 5 equally spaced cup-hooks across the top right by the ceiling. then used drapery clips (ikea) to clip the fabric and hang on cup hooks. i folded about a foot of fabric over the top of the curtain to give a "topper" and made a deep hem of about a foot at the bottom of the curtain.
then to tie them back when i wanted to i used a piece of ribbon with binder rings tied to each side and hung the ribbon tie-back on a cup hook. so at night (or nap time) i just unhook one of the sides of the ribbon tie backs and then re-hook when i want more light.
here are pictures of my nursery (sans rocking chair) to get a better idea